BY JIM N. TAYLOR
In response to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11/01, our Congress and President George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at Presidential Cabinet level.
The Office of Homeland Security is headed by the Secretary of Homeland Security who now supposedly supervises a department that incorporates 22 former agencies and departments involved with different levels of homeland protection as well as other law enforcement, plus the added layers of supposedly coordinating bureaucrats.
Although the Department was originally concerned with terrorists or manmade disasters, the omnivorous nature of bureaucracy grew to include protection against natural disasters (an impossible task). Among manmade disasters, cyber disasters are now included; another dubious government function for DHS.
The growth of the DHS has been phenomenal and now holds not less than 250,000 government employees, some of these being of FEMA and TSA, some of the most publically criticized.
The first efforts at adequately housing the offices of DHS in Washington have all failed and new facilities are now being occupied as we speak.
No military personnel or of the CIA or FBI are within DHS. One would hope that the elimination of employees with duplicate responsibilities within former separate agencies would prevent rapid growth, but this has not been the case; just the opposite has happened. No synergy benefits have arisen as far as the numbers indicate.
The results of the DHS have been negative in that our Constitutional guarantees of freedom are being eroded by the laws created to make DHS effective.
The resistance to these laws and the efforts of DHS to enforce them have unintended consequences and play into the hands of terrorists who hate our freedoms which were what America supposedly was all about. There has been no indication that DHS has any idea of what created the terrorist thrust from ‘radical Islam’; or that DHS has a plan to educate or protect America from Islamic leaders within America.
The number of Muslims being employed within government continues to increase. The number of foreign-owned mosques in American is into the thousands (at least 80%). In spite of the now over 40,000 border protection agents we still do not have control of our borders and we have a large portion of our Congress trying to promote and enact amnesty.
How do you protect a people against their own ignorance? We defend the 38th parallel excellently in Korea but fail with our own borders.
Homeland security is best imposed through education of a well armed citizenry in patriotism, the evils that imperil us, and the responsibility every citizen has to alarm us to the level necessary to overcome them. Every citizen should be an armed agent.
Sadly, we no longer permit proper education, for this would limit diversity and require profiling.
Jim N. Taylor is a Harlingen resident who regularly is published in the Valley Morning Star.
