Anti terror absurdity in America:Hemorrhaging Money for Homeland Security

[rainbow4321]

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,360394,00.html

Fear can be a lucrative business. That, at least, is what American companies selling security gadgets are finding out as the US government continues to spend billions of dollars on a variety of different Homeland Security programs. The only problem? Most of them are useless.

Clark Kent Ervin, 46, is one of those people on whom the US president likes to depend. The staunch Republican is an old friend from Texas who once worked for George W. Bush in the governor's mansion and who, on Bush Junior's recommendation, managed to get a job in Bush Senior's administration. Ervin is an amiable man who is usually quick to smile. The exception? When you mention his last employer -- the two-and-a-half-year-old US Department of Homeland Security. The problems at the bureaucratic behemoth -- with its 180,000 employees -- are myriad, says Ervin, a graduate of Harvard. "I've never experienced anything like it before," he says.

And now Ervin, appointed by his friend Bush to the position of highest-ranking internal auditor on the homeland security front, is suddenly without a job. His reports on the chaos, corruption and wastefulness at the department were so thorough and full-throated that he became a liability to the president. Since Ervin was forced out of the department, the gold rush-like mood in the American security industry, whose excesses were at the center of Ervin's complaints, has continued unabated.

Another criticism of Homeland Security's money-spending ways is that it isn't terribly focused. The security business is booming in places like the Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Wyoming as well --hardly places that come to mind as potential terrorist targets. But according to the requirements stipulated by Congress, the Department of Homeland Security's budget must be equally distributed among all US states and territories. Last year, Wyoming spent $37.74 per capita on homeland security while the state of New York had to make do with $5.41 per capita. The result? Every police officer in Wyoming now has his or her own ABC protective suit.

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. Cheney has a spread in WY

get the picture?