Re-evaluation of U.S. national security ordered

Re-evaluation of U.S. national security ordered

www.iht.com

WASHINGTON: The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, is re-evaluating the largest federal program for testing the country's ability to respond to terrorist attacks, one of several Bush administration initiatives she has ordered to come under review.

As governor of Arizona, Napolitano sent a searing two-page letter to her predecessor as secretary, Michael Chertoff, complaining that a $25 million national exercise in October 2007, which she and 23,000 other federal, state and local emergency workers participated in, was too expensive, too long in planning and "too removed from a real-world scenario."

Now, in her first weeks as head of the Homeland Security Department, Napolitano has ordered a review of that program and several others, including cybersecurity, a strategy for protecting the border with Canada, and the vulnerability of power plants and other critical infrastructure.

The directives implicitly raise questions about how well the Bush administration prepared the nation's defenses against a terrorist attack. But they also reflect what homeland security analysts say is Napolitano's desire to apply her practical experiences as a border-state governor to several important homeland security policies.

Her pointed comments on the emergency preparedness exercise, which she repeated last month at her Senate confirmation hearing, offer a glimpse into how Napolitano may retool one the centerpieces of the Bush administration's domestic security architecture.

(visit the link for the full news article)

None of this sounds like it'll actually change. The best thing to do would be to dissolve the DHS entirely. These people are just going to look for more ways to stifle protests, arrest people without warrants, spy on us, push the REAL ID on us, Which is part of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. And now there's more talk about emergency preparedness, that we should be using "more realistic scenarios". Like what? What is realistic to them exactly?

www.iht.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 17-2-2009 by projectvxn]

They're seriously looking to secure the border with Canada more thoroughly? Sounds pretty ludicrous to me, as having been a former native of the Detroit area, I can personally attest to how tight the Ambassador Bridge and the tunnel to Canada via the Detroit River is. If anything, they should be concentrating quite a bit more of their efforts on the border with Mexico, especially considering how things have been escalating down here. And if they're mainly afraid of Arabic immigrants, well they need look no further than Dearborn, Michigan, which plays host to the second largest Arab population outside of the Middle East.
This just sounds like a bunch of crap to keep the masses happy to me.