DIANA WEST: 75 BILLION DOLLARS AND WHAT DID THEY FORGET?
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1460/Seventy-Five-Billion-Dollars-a-Year-and-What-Did-They-Forget.aspx
Talk about burying the lede. The last ‘graph of the widely anticipated Wash Post takeout on National Intelligence Sprawl says it all, or at least quite a lot:
Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon ….
National security meets St. E’s: How tragically appropriate. And yes, the inmates will definitely be running this asylum — some of the estimated 854,000 Americans with top secret clearance currently and clandestinely spilling out of massive new government complexes all over the country. My conservative brethren seem concerned that the Post report reveals a slew of largely post-9/11 national security secrets. The question is, with nearly a million people possessing Top Secret clearance, how many secrets are there left to reveal? Has our national security apparatus gotten too big not to fail?
The story conveys the sense of intel sprawl with an array of giant figures, beginning with last year’s $75 billion budget, two-and-a-half times larger than the budget was on 9/11.The story continues:
At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.
The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today.
The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled.
Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.
Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.
With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
But with all of that — and I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of thousands of square feet of new security-related office space to house it all — why must we endure the continued indiginity of full-body scanners etc. at our airports just to have a nice flight … maybe? Why are our great institutions still ringed in mazes of siege-like security? Why must we forever live in a “post-9/11” world? The answer is because in all of these 263 organizations created or reorganized since 9/11 at a cost of untold billions of dollars there is one thing they all forgot.
Islam.
I will bet my bottom dollar that there is in all of this burgeoning bureacracy no single office organized to comprehend, apply or even be curious about, in Pentagon parlance, the enemy threat doctrine, which in this particular case is jihad. Similarly, I will bet there is no program designed to investigate the historical, canonical fruits of victorious jihad: namely, Islamic law (sharia), and the attendant condition of dhimmitude that sharia imposes upon Islamized populations — which is both an objective and also an enabler of jihad. Instead, what we see in this fractic explosion of bunker-style infrastructure-cum-high-tech extravagance is an Orwellian study in mass denial, a hamster-in-a-cage approach to what is purposefully obscured as “transnational violent extremists” when the actual threat is in fact guilelessly and precisely presented by all perps as Islamic jihad.
Such is life in the politically correct, multiculturally dictated (read: dishonest) world.
Here’s my idea for reassessing the national security problem and saving the taxpayers trillions in the process.
First, hire a crack team of true experts to catch security officials up on the fundamental doctrinal issues: On jihad as enemy threat doctrine, Maj. Stephen Coughlin; on jihad history and Islamic antisemitism, Andrew Bostom; on dhimmitude across the ages, Bat Ye’or; on revaluing the West, Ibn Warraq. There are many more experts I would tap — and, whaddya know, they’re not on Uncle Sam’s payroll now (among those 854,000 Top Secret personnel). We can start off small, maybe run the thing out of my house. For the time being, Gen. Paul Vallely (USA ret.), our military “lily pad” expert, can even telecommute. (Following the disastrous Russian spy swap, I think we need to overhaul our Russian intel team, but that’s another story.)
Next, stop Islamic immigration to minimize the growth of the pro-sharia demographic in this country. At least for the duration, stop and/or restrict travel to and from Islamic countries because we can’t always count on airline passengers who don’t have Top Secret clearance (or even the 854,000 bureacrats who do) to incapacitate bombers in flight. That won’t stop jihadists boarding in London or Paris necessarily (unless there’s transiting through from Pakistan, for example) but it would surely help prevent our airports from being the defensive line of battle that they now incredibly are.
Also, withdraw our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq and redeploy forces to the border with Mexico.
That should at least get us going. Oh, and one more thing: Turn St E’s into a Top Secret rest home for several hundred thousand indefinitely furloughed intelligence analysts.
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