WP,pg1: "Homeland security" strategy: how does it work, are we safer?

[DeepModem Mom]

A Fight Against Terrorism -- and Disorganization
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 9, 2006; A01

Early this summer, a new strategy for combating terrorism, described by its authors as "revolutionary" in concept, arrived on President Bush's desk. The highly classified National Implementation Plan for the first time set government-wide goals and assigned responsibility for achieving them to specific departments and agencies.

Written by officials at the National Counterterrorism Center, under a directive signed by the president last winter, the 160-page plan aspires to achieve what has eluded the Bush administration in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: bringing order and direction to the fight against terrorism.

In the years since Bush stood atop the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and pledged retaliation against "the people who knocked down these buildings," the federal government has undergone an unprecedented expansion and reorganization.

Yet the counterterrorism infrastructure that resulted has become so immense and unwieldy that many looking at it from the outside, and even some on the inside, have trouble understanding how it works or how much safer it has made the country.

Huge amounts of money have been spent -- $430 billion so far on overseas military and diplomatic counterterrorism operations, according to the U.S. comptroller general, a tripling of pre-9/11 expenditures for domestic security programs to an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion this year, and untallied billions more in state and local money....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/08/AR2006080800964_pf.html

[MissWaverly]

1. it works for what they wanted: snooping and covert stuff

that's what they wanted, and billions of our tax dollars have gone for something the average
american would never approve of. I have an idea, let's have open government, where the budget
is actually managed by the elected representatives of the people, for approved programs.