Do you believe in progress?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Honor, integrity and faith requires that we cynically question and challenge a corrupt and inept leadership, rather than just goose step in formation to whatever destination is picked for us.

Sig worthy

[Lancer]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


Yeah that is more of what I meant, how people hurt each other and take pleasure in hurting others. It really doesn't matter what religion you are, most say the same thing.



I think in terems of human feelings there are certain things everyone would agree are evil.

What do you mean Ben?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Geronimo


How do you measure how much security has been achieved?

I find it impossible to believe that al quaeda and friends haven't intended to launch several massive terrorist attacks in the US since sept 11 2001.

Why? What purpose would that serve? They've drawn the US into heavy, if not decisive, engagement in the mideast. They've demonstrated to their financial backers that they had the ability to pull off a major attack, instead of the semi-trivial crap they had done before. Terrorists like to hit soft, unprepared targets. They got to do that once, but what's really to gain by trying it again?

Curiously they have not. Even if an attack succeeded tommorow it would be hard for me to believe that several attacks were not successfully averted in the previous years.

They probably were - but how "serious" were the attempts to attack, and what resources were expended by each side? Most of this fight is psychological and indirect, not physical or direct.

Is it possible that much of the money has been spent on security measures that are invisible to the public and intended to be invisible to the would be terrorists?

Having worked in a US government contracting office in 2004-5, I got to see and hear a lot of the issues on a level beyond what the public sees. 100% corruption is simply unachievable at an agency level, and pretty impressive if achieved for any task order above the micropurchase threshhold, so some portion of the money spent usually ends up having some sort of useful effect. DHS, though, has pushed the envelope harder than any agency since the War Department under Simon Cameron. When you consider the modern procurement environment and oversight requirements compared to the open extortion and spoils system of Cameron's day, I think DHS has way outperformed Cameron.

What you have is a superagency which added additional layers of bureaucracy and turf to an existing mess, and which was implicitly empowered to rewrite the rules under the guise of "it's for homeland security." The result has been huge abuse of sole-source and preferred vendor contracting, coupled with non-existent to inadequate oversight, mixed with intimidation of agency OIG staff and and minimal, obstructionist pseudocooperation with outside oversight agencies. As far as I know, not one significant DHS task order or contract has been formally closed out, so final costs for a lot of these items won't even be known for a decade or likely more.

[chequita guevara]

Al Qaeda achieved it's main goal, the withdrawl of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia.

They are about to achieve one of their secondary goals, defating the United States, since we are rapidly turning Afganistan against us.

[Ben Kenobi]

What do you mean Ben?

Things like murder, rape, etc. I don't think we'd find disagreement that doing these things is evil.

[SlowwHand]

Polio eradication in civilized countries. Actually, many medical advances.