By Cliff Montgomery – Dec. 9th, 2012
Lawmakers claim to be interested in cutting acts of useless federal spending. If they were serious, they would close the 77 ‘fusion centers’ currently overseen by the Department of land Security (DHS).
Put in place after the Sept. 11th, 2001 attacks, the fusion centers are a U.S.-wide network of offices meant to ensure that local, state and federal officials are usefully sharing data on potential terrorist threats.
From 2003 to 2011, fusion center activities may have cost taxpayers as much as $1.4 billion. But a scathing report released in October revealed the “initiative aimed at improving intelligence sharing has done little to make the country more secure,” according to an October article from The Washington Post.
In fact, declared the Post, “the 77 fusion centers have become pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions.”
The report was based on a two-year inquiry by Senate investigators.
The Senate investigation “found that DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
“In reality,” continued the Senate document, the “investigation found that the fusion centers often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever.”
“Hundreds of draft reports sat for months, awaiting review by homeland security officials, making much of their information obsolete,” pointed out a New York Times article which discussed the Senate study. Over 30% of the fusion center reports studied by Senate investigators “were never [even] published for use within DHS and by other members of the intelligence community, often because they lacked any useful information,” stated the Senate report.
“The investigators also discovered that federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers,” declared the Times, “and that some of the centers listed on paper by the land Security Department do not even exist.”
But those who study the Senate report soon realize where much of your money was spent.
Investigators wrote that officials have spent taxpayer dollars on things like flat-screen televisions, $6,000 laptops, “cell phone tracking devices, and other surveillance equipment unrelated to the analytical mission of a fusion center.” One fusion center bought a $45,000 decked-out SUV for a city official to use around town.
However, the Senate panel wrote, it could not “identify a [single] contribution…fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot.” A number of “current and former DHS officials involved in the fusion center reporting process” went even farther, telling senators that the fusion centers disseminate “predominantly useless information” and sometimes little more than “a bunch of crap.”
But the fusion centers clearly have produced one thing after spending our money.
“DHS continued to store troubling intelligence reports from fusion centers on U.S. persons, possibly in violation of the Privacy Act,” revealed the Senate report.
The “DHS required only a week of training for intelligence officials before sending them to state and local fusion centers to report sensitive domestic intelligence, largely concerning U.S. persons,” continued the study.
The investigation also discovered that “officials who routinely authored useless or potentially illegal fusion center intelligence reports faced no sanction or reprimand.”
A 2009 e-mail uncovered by Senate investigators revealed the concerns of one land Security official, who wrote that fusion centers were amassing data on U.S. citizens and others “without proper vetting,” and that center officials made the further mistake of “improperly reporting this information through homeland information reporting channels.”
All of this can make one wonder if famed trial lawyer Gerry Spence was right when he wrote:
“The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom.
The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.”
Regardless, one thing is sure: No lawmaker – Republican or Democrat – will consider pulling the plug on the fusion centers. That act demands a maturity our political parties simply don’t possess.
