Department of Homeland Security - a throwback?

If one was Russian, the KGB was a good thing - so, whats your point?

btw nice strawman

The GRU and the KGB are not a single entity, and neither oversees the actions of the other.

Winston said:

Personally, I'm wondering if DHS will pick brown as the uniform colour.

Click to expand...

ROTFLMAO!!!!

God that is funny.

That's correct, yes, but the GRU has much more wide-ranging powers than the US military intelligence organs, say.
Anyway, to say that the intelligence organs of the old Soviet Union were all grouped together under one umbrella is false.

http://www.fas.org/irp/world/uk/mi5/


The USA is actually behind the times on this one.
England and Germany have organizations that are similiar. As long as there are enough checks and balances. it is a prudent thing to do.

The signal failure of the FBA and the CIA to properly share information leading up to 9/11 has triggered an extremely predictable response. I'm not sure that having such a fragmented intelligence community within a single nation is such a good idea.

the reason for the fragmentation was to prevent abuses of the rights of citizens as had happened in the past. same reason that CSIS was created out of the rcmp

They need to communicate better if they're not going to share an overseer. Either way works for me.

Bernard Kerik, His Background & History

A dossier on Bernard Kerik, the man GWB picked to head DHS, some interesting reading:

All hail to Caligula's horse

Bush's new head of homeland security is perfect for the job

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday December 9, 2004
The Guardian

In the legend of the war on terrorism, Bernard Kerik, with his trademark shaven head, bristling moustache and black belt in karate, occupies a special place as rough and ready hero. Having risen from military policeman to narcotics detective to New York City police commissioner, he finds himself on 9/11 shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Rudy Giuliani. As the towers crumble the mayor confides in his buddy: "Bernie, thank God George Bush is president."

After the invasion of Iraq, Bush assigns Kerik to train the new Iraqi security forces. Mission accomplished, he returns to Giuliani Partners and becomes motivational speaker to captains of industry, his net worth skyrocketing. One of his most notable aphorisms: "Political criticism is our enemies' best friend." Kerik, the decorated detective, leads an investigation into the safety of cheaper Canadian prescription drugs and accompanies Giuliani before the Senate subcommittee on investigations where he testifies on their danger. (Kerik and Giuliani are rewarded handsomely by their client, the US pharmaceutical drug lobby.)

After John Kerry closes the gap in the presidential debates, Kerik rushes to the rescue, ominously warning of terrorist attacks, "If you put Senator Kerry in the White House, I think you are going to see that happen." Finally, Bush announces Bernard Kerik as the new secretary of homeland security.

The department of homeland security is a bureaucratic Byzantium consisting of 22 agencies with a huge budget exceeding $40bn. Bernard Kerik's appointment was suggested to Bush by Giuliani. With this favour, Kerik's meteoric career has reached its zenith. The high school dropout Kerik fathered an illegitimate daughter in Korea, whom he refused to acknowledge and support. He became a bodyguard for Saudi royals and then a New York narcotics cop. In 1993, he was tapped as Giuliani's chauffeur and bodyguard.

Giuliani made Kerik deputy police commissioner and chief of the corrections department. One million dollars in taxpayers' money used to buy tobacco for inmates disappeared into a private foundation run by Kerik without any accounting. In 2000, Giuliani leapfrogged Kerik over many more qualified candidates to appoint him police commissioner.

Kerik spent much of his time after 9/11 writing a self-promoting autobiography, The Lost Son. The city's conflict of interest board eventually fined him $2,500 for using three policemen to conduct his research.

Dispatched to Iraq to whip security forces into shape, Kerik dubbed himself the "interim interior minister of Iraq." British police advisers called him the "Baghdad terminator", and reported that his reckless bullying was alienating Iraqis. "I will be there at least six months," he said. He left after three.

In waging bureaucratic battles among complex organisations and players, Kerik has less experience in Washington than Baghdad. He cannot be expected to change the funding formula determined by Bush's political calculations to favour interior Republican states. And, undoubtedly, many of those seeking the department's lucrative contracts will be signing up as clients of Giuliani Partners. The looting of Washington, unlike post-invasion Iraq, is legal.

In line with other second-term cabinet appointments - Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state - Kerik will be an enforcer, a loyalist and an incompetent. The resemblance is less to Inspector Clouseau or Chauncy Gardner than to Caligula's horse.

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of salon.com

sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com

link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1369469,00.html

Speaking of Homeland Security...what does everyone think of Kerk withdrawing his name from consideration for Homeland Security Secretary? Seems like he "forgot" to mention some crucial things like his investments, not paying taxes for his nanny, etc.

Bush's AmeriKKKa & DHS a Perfect Fit

Another example of where Dubya & his 'brown shirts' are taking the USA........

A System Bereft of Justice

by Paul Craig Roberts

12/18/04 "Creators Syndicate" -- While enjoying Christmas, good food and drink with family and friends in the warmth and comfort of your home, take a moment to remember the falsely imprisoned. Think about how your own family would handle the grief, because wrongful imprisonment can happen to you.

In a just published book, Thinking About Crime, Michael Tonry, a distinguished American law professor and director of Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, reports that the US has the highest percentage of its population in prison of any country on earth. The US incarceration rate is as much as 12 times higher than that of European countries.

Unless you believe that Americans are more criminally inclined than other humans, what can explain the US incarceration rate being so far outside the international mainstream? I can think of the following reasons:

In order to prove that they are "tough on crime," politicians have criminalized behavior that is legal elsewhere.
Many innocent Americans are in jail.
There is enormous evidence backing up both reasons.

Professor Tonry notes that during the past three decades the number of Americans in prison has increased 700%. Imprisonment has far outstripped the growth in the population. Subtracting children and the elderly, one in eighty Americans of prison eligible age is locked up.

America’s privatized prisons have to be fed with inmates in order to maintain their profitability. Prosecutors need high conviction rates to justify their budgets and to build their careers. Taken together these two facts create powerful incentives to put people away regardless of crime, innocence or guilt.

Consider the case of Charles Thomas Sell as recently told by Carolyn Tuft of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and by Phyllis Schlafly on TownHall (Dec. 13). Mr. Sell, a dentist, has been locked up for almost 8 years without a trial. Allegedly, Sell is guilty of Medicare fraud, but with no evidence or witnesses against him, the virtuous, just, democratic, moral US government tortured Mr. Sell in an effort to make him confess. Now they can’t bring him to trial where he will talk. So Mr. Sell is kept locked up under the pretense that his unwillingness to admit his guilt is evidence that he is mentally incompetent.

Schlafly asks the correct question: "Is there no accountability for this type of government misconduct?" The answer is NO. Mr. Sell might as well be in Stalin’s Gulag or in the hands of the Waffen SS or US captors at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. No one will do anything about the crime that the US government has committed against Mr. Sell.

No one will do anything to help William R. Strong, Jr., another victim of our heartless injustice system. Strong has been in a Virginia prison for a decade on false charges of "wife rape." Mr. Strong has been trying to get a DNA test, confident that the semen in the perk test is not his but that of the lover of his unfaithful wife. But since Strong was convicted prior to the advent of DNA testing, prosecutors argue that he has no right to the evidence.

Another innocent victim of "Virginia justice" is Chris Gaynor, who my investigations indicate was framed by a corrupt prosecutor with the connivance of a corrupt judge, who intimidated Gaynor’s witnesses by jailing one of them. Only liars were permitted on the witness stand. I brought the facts to light in the newspapers at the time, but the Arlington, Virginia, criminal injustice system did not let facts interfere with its show trial.

Government routinely breaks the laws. So says Judge Andrew P. Napolitano in the current issue of Cato Policy Report and in his book, Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws. Judge Napolitano reports on cases of torture, psychological abuse, and frame-ups of innocents that he discovered as the presiding judge. Any American naïve enough to trust the police and prosecutors should read what Napolitano has to say.

Torture has become routine in American prisons. The goal of the torturers is guilty pleas and false testimony against innocent defendants. The torturers succeed. Napolitano reports that "fewer than 3 percent of federal indictments were tried; virtually all the rest of those charged pled guilty."

Does anyone seriously believe that the police are so efficient that 97 out of 100 people indicted are guilty?!

The cherished code, "you are innocent until proven guilty," no longer holds in America. You are guilty when charged. You will be tortured or abused and threatened with more charges until you agree to a plea bargain.

link:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7515.htm

Welcome to Bush's AmeriKKKa!!!