From 9/11 to Portland, it was inevitable 'Homeland Security' would be turned on the American people

[theaocp]

Even in the hazy, flag-waving days surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attack on the United States, there was something about America’s rush to create a massive state apparatus called the Department of Homeland Security that made some people’s skin crawl — and not just the usual patchouli-scented, granola-sated leftist suspects.

“The word ‘homeland’ is a strange word,” George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told staffers in a memo after some floated the idea of combining federal functions around immigration, customs, domestic intelligence, and law enforcement into one vast department even before 9/11. “‘Homeland’ Defense sounds more German than American.”

The USA had functioned just fine for 226 years without a Department of Homeland Security, and the decision to create DHS was never cast in stone. Even the hawkish Bush administration wasn’t sure it was needed — politically, the pressure came from centrist Democrats like former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman eager to show their post-9/11 cojones. Yet once planted in the ground, DHS has grown wildly like choking, invasive kudzu, causing even the libertarian, Koch-Brothers-funded Cato Institute to call it wasteful and declare “Americans are not safer.”

Donald Rumsfeld was very wrong about many, many things — remember the WMD east and west and south and north of Baghdad? — but his qualms about a homeland-security state on U.S. soil were right on the money. The bureaucratic waste and the nation’s failure to confront its real threats from stronger hurricanes to a global pandemic have been bad enough. But the real risk of creating a state-security force was that it would follow the beaten-down jackbooted pathway of every state security force before it and get turned against the American people.

Read more: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/portland-protests-abolish-homeland-security-dhs-911-20200730.html

[Blues Heron]

1. The homeland of the USA is England that's why it's so jarring

sounds Orewellian, always has.

[magicarpet]

2. trDumpie won't be the last Fascist at the helm.

(Think Sen. Cotton.)

[Hotler]

3. Thank the Neocon's. nt

[moondust]

4. I think it was created

as a reaction to different agencies being too independent and not sharing intelligence; as such they failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks. I suppose it was assumed they would work together better if they were under the same administrative roof. At the time many knew it was not a good idea to consolidate so much, especially under a rather authoritarian-sounding name.

There probably was and still is a better solution.