Do We Have Adequate Homeland Security?
By Craig Eisendrath, Chairman of the Project for Nuclear Awareness
Philadelphia, PA December 28, 2007: The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, and the killings at a rally for Nawaz Sharif, another former prime minister and opposition leader, raises the question here in the United States if we have adequate security.
The agency in charge of this is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the third largest agency in the federal government, after the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. DHS, which was established on November 25, 2002, presently has 208,000 employees. In March of 2003, DHS absorbed the duties of the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service. It is presently headed by Michael Chertoff.
It started by using a highly criticized color-coded scale to indicate risks to the country, after the September 11 attacks. Since its founding, it has been dogged by criticism for excessive bureaucracy, waste, and ineffectiveness. Part of the problem has been that instead of concentrating on cities which would be vulnerable to a terrorist attack, it has distributed its resources guided more by political patronage than by threats to national security. Sheer corruption has been cited in its misuse of government credit cards, and the purchase of such useless items as beer brewing kits and plastic dogs. It has also been criticized for infringing on the constitutional rights of privacy, and for using a system fraught with problems called ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement). Employee morale is low, and basic management seems ineffective. Recent reports on Homeland Security reported in the New York Times several months ago indicated a bloated bureaucracy, both wasteful and inefficient.
Given the state of the world today, the Department of Homeland Security needs to clean up its act. In the light of current events, the security of our country demands no less.
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