Homeland Security memo twisted out of shape by the right

This week the Homeland Security Department released a memo outlining ongoing terror threats and new ones that are developing.

Within hours the right was all over the document, and distorting it in misleading and terrible ways.

Well, let me defend the memo and the department and its chief, former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano.

First, let's address the whole issue of domestic versus foreign terrorism. Despite what you may have heard, nowhere does the memo suggest that we should be any less vigilant on the issue of foreign terrorists. We still live in a world containing people outside the United States who want to kill Americans and the memorandum says nothing to downplay that fact.

It does however highlight domestic terrorism as the fastest growing terror threat at this time. If anything, I'd think the right would be taking plaudits and repeating their oft-repeated assertion that this shows that the Bush administration's policy against foreign terrorists worked, at least inside the United States. And while I may feel that some of the tactics employed by the Bush administration may have been unnecessarily intrusive and a violation of civil rights (such as the right to search your home when you are not present and without presenting a warrant) I'm willing to give them credit in that attacks by foreign terrorists since 9/11 have all occurred outside rather than inside the United States.

But the right chooses to go after the whole 'domestic terrorist' argument as an attack on them. Where does it say that? The memo is about growing terrorist threats, and nowhere does it suggest that anyone who speaks out peacefully against the administration is a threat.

It does go into some detail about the profile of people that domestic terror groups are looking to recruit. One sentence states that returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are more likely to be recruited by these groups because they value their weapons training and combat experience. Unfortunately the right has turned this on its ear and said that the memo claims that veterans are now being called terrorists. House Republican Leader John Boehner called the language 'offensive' and demanded an apology. The commander of the American Legion demanded that that section of the document be retracted. Napolitano has contacted him to set up a meeting to discuss the issue. However the interpretation that the memorandum calls veterans domestic terrorsts is a gross distortion. For one thing, the memo says that these groups are looking to recruit returning veterans. Obviously if you are recruiting someone they are not yet a member of your organization. Further, it is a fact that all terrorist organizations (foreign or domestic) need to recruit people and if you know who they want to recruit then you can take advantage of that knowledge (for example if the FBI wants to infiltrate a domestic terror group then they would probably start by looking for agents that fit the profile of who the group is recruiting.) Saying that domestic terror groups look to recruit veterans is no more an indictment of veterans than for example the statement that al-Qaeda likes to recruit young unemployed muslims is an indictment of all young unemployed muslims (at least not to any rational person-- maybe the right does read it that way since some of them actually do believe that all young unemployed muslims are therefore terrorists.)

The memo goes on to discuss a number of specific issue-indentified terror threats, most notably militant anti-abortion groups or individuals. From this, the right has twisted it to claim that anyone who expresses a pro-life opinion on abortion is therefore being tarred as a terrorist. Which is of course ridiculous. Nothing in the memo says any such thing, but it is a fact that we live in a nation in which several doctors have been murdered and numerous abortion clinics have been bombed. This is terrorism, plain and simple, and if the right can't figure out the difference between a pastor who uses his First Amendment right to speak out against abortion and Eric Robert Rudolf, then they are either stupid or are being wilfully ignorant. The Homeland Security Department is concerned with preventing acts of violence, and if there is an increased potential for violence from anti-abortion extremists then it is the responsibility of the deparment to recognize that and take action to prevent it. The memo isn't about shutting anybody up, it's about stopping terrorists before they strike.

And that is the crux of the problem. If this memorandum was never issued and a terrorist attack occurred then the department would be attacked for never delving into the groups that carried it out (just as the right used the occasion of the Oklahoma City Bombing to jump all over the Clinton administration for supposedly weakening domestic surveillance and not looking closer at those kinds of groups after Waco.)

Incidentally the same memorandum suggests that left-wing extremists are more likely to be involved with cyberterrorism. I'm not sure how come computer literate people on the left are more likely to engage in malicious hacking than computer literate people on the right, but I am throwing that in to show the contrast-- for the most part the righties are assuming this memo targets them and are ignoring that section of the document, except for a couple of talk radio heads who have instead jumped on it as what they claim is 'the only thing in it that is true.' You can't win with this paranoid, xenophobic crowd.

I would like to conclude that I believe that it was a mistake to put FEMA under the auspices of the Homeland Security Department. DHS is tasked with stopping terrorism before it happens, not picking up the pieces afterward. That is what FEMA does, but if DHS does its job well then FEMA will be able to concentrate on natural disasters.

But instead of 'you're doing a great job, Brownie' apparently the reaction of the right to the memo put out by DHS is that they are baking something into the brownies.

If we are going to spend this much on defense then we should invest in human resources first.

We've heard all the arguments about how we need a secure America in justifying bloated defense budgets, which are many times more than any other nation in the world spends on its military.

Yet, we read all the time about proposed cuts in veterans programs, the attempt a few years ago by the Bush administration to cut the extra pay troops get when they are in combat, and (this affected my brother in law) when they flew troops home from Iraq on a short furlough, they dumped national guard troops off in cities on the east coast and they had to buy their own tickets home if they wanted to see their families (his Colorado national guard unit was flown to if I remember right either Atlanta or Baltimore). We've seen that our army has been stretched to the limit in Iraq, with tours of duty increased and rotation time back home cut as the only way to create the 'surge.' Four years ago, John Kerry said he would if President ask Congress to provide the funding for the creation of two new combat divisions. He lost the election, and the result is that they have not yet been created. We've seen that the chronically low pay in the military has meant that some military families have had to go on food stamps or other means of public assistance, especially during the times when one parent is deployed overseas. We've heard gut wrenching stories of veterans who have been left seriously injured by war, but who have not been given the support they need or have been denied the benefits that disabled veterans have been given in previous conflicts.

So this begs the question: In a military budget that runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, why can't we find more to pay and otherwise support our men and women in uniform, and why can't we find the relatively smaller amounts it would take to support the veterans administration which is now dealing with its own surge-- in Iraq and Afghan war veterans who need help when they get back home? Even things that they need right now-- like better body armor and up-armored humvees, have been slowed down by bureaucrats who apparently think that those items aren't important enough to put it in the 'urgent' box.

Yhe answer is the same as it always has been, but exaggerated by the twisted 'compassionate conservatism' of the Bush administration, in which individuals often have to deal with the effects of cuts in any kind of services, but there is no limit on the generosity of this government when it comes to corporate welfare.

For example, the biggest story right now involving military contracts is that a European company, Airbus, have been given a contract over Boeing to make air refueling tankers. It is true that one could argue that there are some security concerns regarding background checks, but I would think this would be a relatively minor concern, especially for a European company (we have more sensitive military components than that manufactured in China, for heaven's sake!) What this story has really exposed is that it is all about money. The Airbus model was superior to the Boeing proposal in five out of five criteria, so there is no question that it is a better product, but a lot of people are objecting because of the billions of dollars that will be spent on it (and which therefore won't go to Boeing.) Let me ask it this way: If you are an American pilot, wouldn't you want to have to depend on a more reliable fueling tanker? But somehow this never even has been brought up. We've heard about the money this will cost investors and the company, we've heard about the 44,000 jobs this will cost Americans, which is a legitimate concern, but let's face it-- these employees are being used as pawns for Boeing to hide behind; the real issues is the money. If you want proof, consider that this is actually a rebid contract-- the government official who shepherded through the initial, inflated contract which went to Boeing without a serious bidding process was subsequently hired by the company as a consultant and paid a lot more than any of those 44,000 workers would have earned.

We know the Pentagon is in love with high-tech gadgetry. And as far as developments like laser guided missiles and computer drones etc. have helped with efficiency and reduced casualties that is great. But it has also become an Achilles heel. As I mentioned earlier, many crucial components of our military weapons are manufactured abroad, including some in China. And today we saw a story about how Chinese hackers (who claim they are sometimes paid by the Government, a claim Beijing denies have penetrated the most secure of Pentagon websites In fact, it does not matter whether they are paid by the government or not. The point is that if there were ever a military conflict they could at a crucial time shut down most or all of our computers. If that happened it would depend on the American soldier, and not on all the high tech gadgetry.

I have faith that in such a situation the American soldier would still be able to prevail. But in that context, we have to ask why we are pouring so much money down an endless drain of fat military contracts to build ever and ever more expensive and ultimately more vulnerable weapons systems, while at the same time we spend less and less on the most important and fundamental weapons system we have-- the American serviceman.

Empty Words

A few months ago during the Michael Vick imbroglio, basketball player Stephon Marbury defended dogfighting as 'a sport.' I took Marbury to task for his choice of words, and wrote,

Well, I suppose that you can call anything a 'sport,' no matter how barbaric it is, even dwarf-tossing or Russian roulette.

And I suppose you could refer to a Volkswagen as a Rolls Royce, but at the end of the day it remains a Volkswagen.

Marbury's comments were however a tiny transgression compared to what we have heard from both the Bush administration and from wordsmiths on talk radio and elsewhere on the far right.

I don't have to, but I will remind you of the unfunded mandate that has resulted in schools encouraging underachieving students to drop out for fear of the budgetary consequences of that child remaining in class, that is called, 'no child left behind,' and of the legislation that increases the amount of pollutants in our air called, the 'clear skies act' or in the water that is called the 'clean water act,' or of the clear-cutting bill called, 'the healthy forests act.'

We've seen 'support the troops' become a buzzword for 'support the President's foreign policy,' even while the same administration works feverishly to cut funding for the VA and denies disability claims for thousands of vets wounded in Iraq, who come home with life-altering injuries.

And recently we've seen that the right likes to refer to the U.S. healthcare system as 'the best in the world.' But that is simply not true. People in other industrialized countries such as Canada live longer than we do, have lower infant mortality and in fact, as I wrote about recently, avail themselves of our so-called 'superior' system in vanishingly small numbers, while many, many times as many Americans have bought prescription drugs from Canadian sources, despite the best efforts of our government to prevent it. Of course Americans can't use Canada's healthcare system because they bar us from it. In fact, our healthcare system is worse than those in Europe or Canada, plus it is much more expensive in terms of our GDP, but those on the right continue to delude themselves that they can call a turkey an eagle.

And today, the house will certainly vote not to override the President's veto on SCHIP. All along, they've been questioning the income limits. But here is the dirty little secret: the income limits are the same as they are in the current authorization of the program. And for that matter, the number bandied about ($83,000 for a family of four) is not the federal limit on income, that is the maximum that a state can request be eligible for the program but the President has to approve the request. Other wise the eligibility cap remains where it is at the Federal level, about fifteen thousand dollars less than that. But you won't hear that on right wing radio, they'd much rather smear a twelve year old whose family, despite what they make, will soon lose their home because of medical bills.

But I suppose all this wordsmithing works well for conservatives who don't want to spend a dime on anything.

Words are cheap.

Response to several emails

I've received several requests to post the letter I had published in the print edition of the USA Today last week since it is apparently not available online.

The letter was in response to an article they had the week before on the last four living American veterans of World War I (also dubbed 'the war to end all wars.')

The letter read as follows:

Your feature on the last remaining World War I vets was as riveting as it was poignant. Truly this 'war to end all wars' has been forgotten, and those who are today remembered only in Flanders Fields have been forgotten along with it.

Also forgotten is the lesson that the world should have learned. As horrible as World War I was, it did not end war. The idea that the way to prevent future wars is by fighting a war now was as much a myth then as it is today.

Bush proposes to cut Veteran's Health care after this year.

Never unpredictable, our President has proposed, in his attempt to balance the budget while preserving his massive tax cuts and fighting the Iraq war, that we continue cutting veteran's healthcare. Of course his record on veteran's issues is already dismal, having closed several V.A. hospitals and made other cuts in veterans' health care. It has on the whole risen because of the Iraq and Afghan wars, but that is despite the best efforts of this administration to oppose that.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans' health care two years from now — even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system....


The number of veterans coming into the VA health care system has been rising by about 5 percent a year as the number of people returning from Iraq with illnesses or injuries keep rising. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans represent almost 5 percent of the VA's patient caseload, and many are returning from battle with grievous injuries requiring costly care, such as traumatic brain injuries.

All told, the VA expects to treat about 5.8 million patients next year, including 263,000 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The White House budget office, however, assumes that the veterans' medical services budget — up 83 percent since Bush took office and winning a big increase in Bush's proposed 2008 budget — can absorb a 2 percent cut the following year and remain essentially frozen for three years in a row after that


Yup, support the troops.

Sometimes I don't even have to comment on some things this administration does. They speak for themselves.