Controlled fusion — as opposed to fission — of atoms has long been the holy grail of nuclear energy proponents, to date with no success, although physicists have lately made amazing breakthroughs in, for instance, bringing forward evidence of the existence of the elusive Higgs boson.
It would seem that efforts to successfully achieve fusion at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are equally elusive.
A few days ago, CIS published a blog in which I expressed my consternation at the dismal efforts at DHS to create and achieve an intelligent (or even intelligible) risk management strategy — something that they have ballyhooed at every opportunity.
As if we needed more proof of DHS's failure on every significant front, now comes a report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a part of the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The report exposes, in excruciating detail, the ineptitude and fiscal unaccountability of DHS in creating and funding a variety of intelligence fusion centers jointly staffed (thus the "fusion") by federal, state, and local law enforcement officers throughout the nation.
The centers were established with the ostensible purpose of sharing information among and between the various levels of government in order to deter and detect terrorism. It appears they haven't done very well. Among a select few of the report's critical findings:
- Some fusion center employees wrote inappropriate, possibly illegal analyses, centering on constitutionally protected activities of U.S. citizens.
- There is no credible evidence that any of the fusion centers have produced actionable intelligence leading to the detection of any terrorist event or activity in their several years of existence. This is interesting: The Senate report specifically rejects prior public assertions by DHS Secretary Napolitano crediting one of the fusion centers with exposing Afgani terrorist Najibullah Zazi’s 2009 plot to carry out a suicide bombings on the New York subway system and Pakistani terrorist Faisal Shahzad’s 2010 attempt to blow up a vehicle in New York's Times Square.
- Some of the analyses produced were downright wrong, including one widely distributed report by an Illinois fusion center last year that a Russian computer hacker had hijacked the user names and passwords to control systems of sensitive critical infrastructure sites.
- DHS has no idea exactly how much money it has spent on these centers, providing Senate investigators with a figure somewhere between $289 million and $1.4 billion.
- This latter is astounding. That's a range of more than a billion dollars. This is a federal department spending our tax dollars! Is that the best that they can do? What's their chief financial officer been doing all this time?
It is significant to note that the Senate is controlled by the Democratic Party. The chair of this subcommittee is Carl Levin, longtime Democratic Senator from Michigan. No one can accuse the writers of this report of having political motivations in undermining the president's reelection campaign.
When I think about DHS under this administration, I'm reminded of the movie set for an old Western town: all verisimilitude on the outside, but walk through the doors of the saloon, marshal's office, or hotel, and you discover that there's no "there" there.
The Senate subcommittee report is a good start at documenting the consistent nonfeasance, misfeasance, and perhaps malfeasance of this important (not to mention large and hugely expensive) government agency. What we have yet to see, though, is anyone being held accountable, from the top down.