Bush administration homeland security

Post-9/11 Homeland Security Failures

"The Bush administration has missed dozens of deadlines set by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks for developing ways to protect airplanes, ships and railways from terrorists," the Associated Press's Leslie Miller reported October 30, 2005.

For example: "A plan to defend ships and ports from attack is six months overdue. Rules to protect air cargo from infiltration by terrorists are two months late. A study on the cost of giving anti-terrorism training to federal law enforcement officers who fly commercially was supposed to be done more than three years ago."

Mississippi Representative Bennie G. Thompson, the "top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee," said that "the government has yet to develop a comprehensive plan to protect roads, bridges, tunnels, power plants, pipelines and dams. He said a broad plan to protect levies and dams might have helped prevent the New Orleans levies from being breached" as a result of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Miller wrote.

The administration has also failed to:

• investigate 9/11
  • 9-11 Truth Movement
• avoid further provocation of retaliatory terrorists
• retain the respect of (now former) international allies
• responsibly comprehend 9/11
  • Bush regime delusions
  • why do they hate us?

Gaps in Homeland Security Benefit Bush Campaign Funders

OMB Watch reported that:

The Bush administration has weakened, opposed, or failed to initiate proposals to address security gaps that leave chemical and nuclear plants, hazardous material carriers, shipping ports, and drinking water facilities vulnerable to terrorist attacks, according to a new report that links these failures to Bush campaign funding from the very industries that oppose needed regulation.

According to the new Public Citizen report "Homeland Unsecured: The Bush Administration's Hostility to Regulation and Ties to Industry Leave America Vulnerable", the Bush administration "has abdicated its responsibility to protect the American homeland from the risk of potentially catastrophic terrorist attacks upon chemical plants, nuclear reactors, hazardous materials transport, seaports and water systems."

"In many cases, the administration and its Republican allies in Congress have either opposed security reforms or obstinately refused to act even though ready solutions are obvious," the report maintains.

Post-9/11 Tendencies

• "...indulgence toward regimes that are strongly implicated in terrorism, and of focusing on actual terrorist threats only when forced to by events." --Paul Krugman
• continuing weapons proliferation
  • inability to secure weapons caches found in Iraq [1]
  • inability to secure nuclear facilities and radioactive materials in Iraq [2]
• promotion of Islamist militism by its reckless invasion and occupation of Iraq, according to the CIA's National Intelligence Council report released January 2005.
• This unfortunate and negative assessment was refreshed again in June 2005:
  • "Iraq May Be Prime Place for Training of Militants, C.I.A. Report Concludes", NY Times, 22 June 2005. [3]
  • " Iraq Creating New Breed of Jihadists, says CIA", Guardian, 23 June 2005.

Pre-9/11 Homeland Security Failures

The Bush administration failed to:

• responsively acknowledge pre-9/11 threat
  • rejection of U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (Hart-Rudman Task Force on Homeland Security) Report for partisan purposes.[4] Vice President Dick Cheney was going to have some meetings or task force or something, in order to contemplate a response[5], not prevention or preparation; but those meetings never happened anyway.[6]
  • Paul Bremer said in a speech at McCormick Tribune Foundation conference on terrorism on February 26, 2001, delivered in Wheaton, Illinois, that the Bush administration was "paying no attention" to terrorism. [7]

    "What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this'"

  • Richard A. Clarke
  • Sibel Edmonds
  • Gary Hart [8]
  • August 6, 2001, President's Daily Briefing Memo
  • focused on missile defense to protect the homeland
  • Reference this Detailed Timeline of Administration Statements On National Security from January 20 to September 10, 2001

Notes

Condoleezza Rice "is also likely to be questioned about a speech she was to have delivered on the night of the attacks touting missile defense as a priority rather than al-Qaida. The White House has refused to provide the commission with a copy of the speech, the outlines of which were reported by The Washington Post. [9]

The commission submitted a last-minute request for Rice's aborted Sept. 11 address, U.S. sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity. But the White House has refused on the grounds that draft documents are confidential, the sources said.

"The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered." Knight-Ridder 15 Apr. 2005

Related SourceWatch Resources

• Bush administration: Homeland Defense 2001
• Clinton administration: Homeland Defense Before 2001
• National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive

External links

• DeceptionDollar.com website.
• FromTheWilderness.com website.
• Homeland inSecurity and Total(itarian) Information Awareness and Northern Command (NORTHCOM) pages at OilEmpire.us.
• Douglas Valentine, "Homeland Security for Whom? Are Bush, Ashcroft, and Wolfowitz Protecting America or Their Own Regime?" CounterPunch, August 11, 2003. Adapted from July 2003 issue of Penthouse Magazine.