Suck it up Americans. You may be hungry, homeless, out of work and sick, but by golly,

[sad sally]

your Terrorism Bureau and the other 1,271 Terrorism Organizations are at work - protecting you.

January 4, 2012 4:29pm
Obama launches Bureau of Counterterrorism

President Obama's State Department announced, during a press briefing today, the creation of the Bureau of Counterterrorism, which will coordinate with United States entities such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and foreign governments to develop civilian counterterrorism strategies and operations.

"The mission of the new bureau will be to lead the [State] Department in the U.S. Government’s effort to counter terrorism abroad and to secure the United States against foreign terrorist threats," Ambassador Dan Benjamin told reporters. "The bureau will lead in supporting U.S. counterterrorism diplomacy and seek to strengthen homeland security, countering violent extremism, and build the capacity of partner nations to deal effectively with terrorism."

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/obama-launches-bureau-counterterrorism/292831?du

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/?du

[Angry Dragon]

1. I feel safer now

[snappyturtle]

2. Thank you...very interesting post.

Terrorism will be the downfall of life as we know it however, the downfall won't be the result of terrorists but instead the counter-terrorists. imho

[sad sally]

6. Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

[midnight]

3. K&R

[EFerrari]

4. Kick

[Politicalboi]

5. Another government benefit

From 9/11. But let's not blame anyone shall we.

[99Forever]

7. I'm terrorized that ..

.. being longterm jobless at age 58, I may never find work again. That scares the crap out of me, for real.

People half way around the world I've never met?

Not so much.

[sad sally]

11. Imagine if even a fraction of what's been spent on counterterrorism had been spent differently.

AMERICA has increased homeland security spending by more than $1 trillion in the decade since the 9/11 attacks. A new academic paper [PDF] from John Mueller (of Ohio State University) and Mark Stewart (of the University of Newcastle in Australia) attempts to determine whether the return on investment justified those huge expenditures. They also ask whether policymakers ever considered anything remotely resembling a cost-benefit analysis before they spent all that money. The answer in both cases, it seems, is no:

To be deemed cost-effective, [the increased expenditures] would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day. Although there are emotional and political pressures on the terrorism issue, this does not relieve politicians and bureaucrats of the fundamental responsibility of informing the public of the limited risk that terrorism presents and of seeking to expend funds wisely. Moreover, political concerns may be over-wrought: restrained reaction has often proved to be entirely acceptable politically.

Gulliver has always argued that many post-9/11 "innovations" in homeland security are not worth their cost. But the findings in this paper are truly remarkable. By 2008, according to the authors, America's spending on counterterrorism outpaced all anti-crime spending by some $15 billion. Messrs Mueller and Stewart do not even include things like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which they call "certainly terrorism-determined) in their trillion-plus tally. There's lots in the paper to dig through, and the authors are publishing a book this fall on this same topic that I am eager to read. But I found this section—an attempt to explain why America spent all that money—particularly interesting:

[A] most common misjudgment has been to embrace extreme events as harbingers presaging a dire departure from historical patterns. In the months and then years after 9/11, as noted at the outset, it was almost universally assumed that the terrorist event was a harbinger rather than an aberration. There were similar reactions to Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 truck bomb attack in Oklahoma City as concerns about a repetition soared. And in 1996, shortly after the terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo set off deadly gas in a Tokyo subway station, one of terrorism studies' top gurus, Walter Laqueur, assured the world that some terrorist groups "almost certainly" will use weapons of mass destruction "in the foreseeable future." Presumably any future foreseeable in 1996 is now history, and Laqueur’s near “certainty” has yet to occur.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/04/deterring_terrorism?du

[Zorra]

8. I'm getting really sick of paying all these taxes just to protect the 1%

and their holdings and assets in other countries.

[unkachuck]

9. K&R....I'm feeling safer already....n/t

[pacalo]

10. The government has had a little help from Fixed News in robbing the national treasury.

[woo me with science]

12. Goodbye, Internet.

Goodbye, civil liberties.

[RKP5637]

15. Goodbye any hint of a democracy. Anymore, you're an enemy of the state

until proven otherwise ... but the latter's been taken away too.

[RKP5637]

13. Bin Laden won, even from the grave, scared rabbits running all about ... and

wasting money, driving the country into financial despair, and 50% poverty rate with a decaying infrastructure.

[Iggo]

14. And by gawd, you are exceptional!!!!

[Blue_Tires]

16. this is nothing new...

the counter-terrorism "industry" has been the one reliable growth market for a decade, especially with the way the Pentagon dishes out the $$$$...There is practically a mini-city in Northern Va. consisting of just private 'intelligence' companies, and they can't build new office parks fast enough...

[think]

17. Thank you for posting. The interview with Lt Gen. Vines was quite revealing:

....Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."....

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/1/?du=

[div]

[raouldukelives]

18. Who says socialism doesn't create jobs. nt

[xchrom]

19. Du rec. Nt

[RC]

20. Bureau of Counterterrorism???

Sounds like something other countries would do to counteract our meddling around the world.

[bvar22]

21. Our government's "Bi-Partisan" over reaction to 19 assholes with box cutters...

...sure did fuck things up for the 99%.
The 1% got even RICHER.




You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their excuses.
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