The Raw Story

Sunday, 22 February 2015

SOTT Satire Desk: the 2015 'Oscars'

Best actor

The best actor award goes to......Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, for his portrayal of a sensitive, caring, jovial, human being, in the 'Bibi-sitter'.

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Best film

The best film award.....is for the Head Choppers. An extremely violent film featuring countless acts of barbarity and set in the Middle East, depicting man's inhumanity to fellow man. The film's PR team also won the inaugural 'marshmallow unicorn' award for their creativity in promotion and marketing. Unfortunately, no members of the Saudi Arabia Royal family were able to attend, so a close friend and ally received the award on their behalf.

'Jihadi' John Kerry accepting the Best Film award on behalf of the Saudi Royal family for the 'Head Choppers'

Best documentary

50 shades of filth.... won the best documentary award, for highlighting the glorification and acceptance of pornography and revealing society's moral bankruptcy.

Best foreign film

The best foreign film award..... goes to Je suis un mouton (I am a sheep). The film's director Ivor Sansa Doomavich, upon accepting the award, dedicated it to the heroic, anti-establishment French comic Dieudonné, who was unable to attend due to a prior engagement.

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Best supporting actor

This award was actually shared by six relatively unknown actors who starred as the Patsy brothers, also in Je suis un mouton (I am a sheep). Ivor Sansa Doomavich, renowned as an enigmatic character in the cinematic world, stunned the audience by suggesting his current film would also be his last. " 'Closing of the Grand Cycle' is due to be completed...... very, very soon" he mysteriously added.

A scene from Je suis un mouton - showing two of the award winning supporting actors portraying the Patsy brothers

Gary

Gary Boyle joined the SOTT Team in 2013, where he does his bit to expose the psychos in power by writing satire and keeping an eye on scientific developments. A social care worker and part-time unpaid taxi driver for his teenaged children, Gary has a background in architecture, with particular interest in natural building. He enjoys a simple life on the increasingly ponerized British Isles, where he is striving to rebuild ‘Soul Communities'.

© Kimimasa Mayama (Pool/AFP/File

A TEPCO employee measures radiation levels as workers construct an ice wall at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture on July 9, 2014.

Sensors at the Fukushima nuclear plant have detected a fresh leak of highly radioactive water to the sea, the plant's operator announced Sunday, highlighting difficulties in decommissioning the crippled plant.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the sensors, which were rigged to a gutter that pours rain and ground water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to a nearby bay, detected contamination levels up to 70 times greater than the already-high radioactive status seen at the plant campus.

TEPCO said its emergency inspections of tanks storing nuclear waste water did not find any additional abnormalities, but the firm said it shut the gutter to prevent radioactive water from going into the Pacific Ocean.

The higher-than-normal levels of contamination were detected at around 10 am (0100 GMT), with sensors showing radiation levels 50 to 70 times greater than usual, TEPCO said.

Though contamination levels have steadily fallen throughout the day, the same sensors were still showing contamination levels about 10 to 20 times more than usual, a company spokesman said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the original spike of the contamination and its gradual fall, he added.

"With emergency surveys of the plant and monitoring of other sensors, we have no reason to believe tanks storing radioactive waste water have leaked," he told AFP.

"We have shut the gutter (from pouring water to the bay). We are currently monitoring the sensors at the gutter and seeing the trend," he said.

The latest incident, one of several that have plagued the plant in recent months, reflects the difficulty in controlling and decommissioning the plant, which went through meltdowns and explosions after being battered by a giant tsunami in March 2011, sparking the world's worst nuclear disaster in a generation.

TEPCO has not been able to effectively deal with an increasing amount of contaminated water, used to cool the crippled reactors and molten fuels inside them and kept in large storage tanks on the plant's vast campus.

Adding to TEPCO's headaches has been the persistent flow of groundwater from nearby mountains travelling under the contaminated plant before washing to the Pacific Ocean.

The International Atomic Energy Agency recently said TEPCO has made "significant progress" in cleaning up the plant, but suggested that Japan should consider ways to discharge treated waste water into the sea as a relatively safer way to deal with the radioactive water crisis.

In recent years, statistical cancer death rates have been showing decreases for some cancers in some parts of the world, which has led some people to optimistically report that cancer is getting easier to beat. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Cancer is actually getting harder to beat as a result of three primary culprits: 1) Our world is becoming increasingly toxic, 2) We are beset by existing and increasing radiation, and 3) Our food is becoming increasingly less nutritious.

As noted in "Hiding the Truth about Losing the War on Cancer", statistics can be manipulated and often have been by those with vested interests in maintaining the illusion that we are turning the corner, or that a cure is just around that elusive corner, in the decades long and mostly failed war on cancer.

The statistics which tell the real story are those which clearly show that the incidence of cancer continues to grow alarmingly, as does the expected worldwide cancer deaths. Between one in two and one in three people are now expected to encounter cancer in their lifetimes.

According to the WHO's World Cancer Report, considered to be the most comprehensive global examination of the disease to date, cancer rates could further increase by 50% to 15 million new cases in the year 2020.

Many people, including this author, believe that a great deal of the credit for declining death rates is a result of more people looking outside the failed mainstream therapies box and relying on natural and alternative means to address their cancers. As the aforementioned WHO report also noted, there was "provides clear evidence that healthy lifestyles and public health action by governments and health practitioners could stem this trend, and prevent as many as one third of cancers worldwide."

The good news is that, thanks to websites like this one and the writers and natural health advocates who are spreading the good word, an increasing number of people are learning about, and turning to, natural and alternative therapies. The bad news is that alternative, non-mainstream, non-toxic and non-invasive therapies continue to be repressed and misrepresented in mainstream studies. The further bad news is that even those who do learn the truth about alternatives are often finding cancer is getting harder to avoid and beat. Though this article is primarily about cancer, the same is true for heart disease and other major chronic illness, and for pretty much the same reasons: we continue to become exposed to more and more toxins and pollution, live unhealthy lifestyles and eat diets that are less nutritionally sound. As a result, our immune systems and our vitality continue to decline - and regardless of any treatment, herb or therapy, mainstream or otherwise, it is our immune system, nature's first line of defense against illness, that is the most important key to beating and avoiding cancer.

People do not beat and avoid cancer nor get other illnesses due to a deficiency in chemotherapy or deficiencies in mainstream medicine. They get cancer and become ill because toxins and diseases beat their immune systems. As data from the CDC and other have shown, our immune systems are becoming progressively weaker, the same as male sperm count is progressively declining. In 1981, Dr. H. F. Pross did a study of the average Natural Killer (NK) count of average Americans. NK count is measured in lytic units (LU), and Dr. Pross found that the average LU count in 1981 was 152. In 1991, Dr. R. B. Herberman did a similar study and found that the LU count had dropped to 135. In 1997, Dr. Gerald See did another study and found the count had dropped to 108. In other words, we are dropping at about the rate of 1 LU per year. Which means that the average LU count in 2009 is likely to be somewhere around 96 - which would be an alarming drop of 37% in less than three decades!

Other than earlier detection and including some easily remedied forms of cancer that were once considered simply pre-cancerous conditions, little real progress has been made by the use of mainstream invasive and toxic therapies of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation - all which have been shown to increase the spread of cancer and weaken the body to pave the way for further cancer, particularly the latter two (chemo and radiation).

Most people are likely unaware that virtually all chemotherapy drugs are themselves classified as Class 1 carcinogens! And radiation merely destroys our bone marrow that is the heart of our immune system.

A strong immune system from proper diet and nutrition, a healthy lifestyle, elimination of stress, and proper supplementation and nutrition, is still the best way to avoid and beat cancer, especially when buttressed by herbal immune boosters and cancer fighters. But it takes diligence and effort - more so now than ever before.

Cancer and the world we live in have changed a lot during the past 50 years and for that reason we do not seem to see the same successes with some of the famed treatments of prior decades, like the outstanding Budwig Diet protocol, Essiac tea, Hoxsey, Gerson, Laetrile, etc. Cancer appears to be getting harder to avoid and harder to beat once acquired. That is likely due to a number of factors.

As the late, great French scientist Antoine Bechamp told us, most disease is a result of poor cellular terrain (cells which have not been properly nourished, cleansed, hydrated and oxygenated) in combination with exposure to toxins. Yet as time goes by, our world is becoming increasingly toxic and our foods less and less nourishing. Since the beginning of the industrial age, man has added around 100,000 unnatural chemical compounds to our environment, less than 1,000 of which have been tested individually in any way for safety and almost none of which have been tested in combination with one another.

Another toxic problem, and one we will likely have to live with for centuries is the amount of radiation now found in virtually every square inch of the earth's surface as a result of the atmospheric atomic bomb blasts that spewed millions of tons of radioactive material into our environment. Two time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling warned of millions of deaths and injuries that could be expected as a result of atmospheric bomb tests. He was rewarded by having the State Department pull his passports. A pre-eminent Russian scientist and later Nobel Laureate himself, Andrei Sakharov, predicted between half a million and one million deaths for every 50 megatons of atmospheric bomb tests (ultimately the tests of the United States and Russia combined to produce fallout equivalent to 40,000 Hiroshimas). Instead of having his passports pulled, Sakharov received a free trip and vacation from the state - an exile to a Siberian Gulag for the next 20 plus years, that is. In addition to the radiation from nuclear bomb tests that will stay with us for ages, we are increasingly being bombarded with microwaves and high power transmission lines, which industry is recently beginning to lose their decades long cover up of the dangers they have known such technology presented.

Next, you have about 25,000 FDA approved medications (both prescribed and over the counter) which have been mostly poorly tested for safety individually, scarcely tested for carcinogenic/mutagenic short or long term dangers, and almost none of which have been tested in combination with each other. Over 95% of all FDA approved medications have known side effects by themselves. In combination, one can only imagine what short and long term side-effects could result - and one is reminded that many chronic conditions are years in the making. Some cancers, for example, take eight years after they have gained a foothold to grow to the size of a pinhead (after which, the doubling rate increases their size much faster.

Then there are the foods and nutrition we tend to consume (or not consume as the case may be). The food products on the grocers shelves have by and large had the nutrition processed out and additives processed in for added shelf life, flavor, color and texture. The ones that claim to be "enriched" with vitamins and minerals are enriched mostly with synthetic petro-chemical vitamins and crushed rock minerals - not natural ones or ones that have been pre-digested by plants to be bio-available for human benefit.

Our fruit and vegetables are picked early and artificially ripened/preserved with chemicals - plus they often contain pesticides and/or herbicides and come from over-farmed soils which severely lack the major and trace minerals needed for optimum nutrition. Increasingly, our major food crops are being genetically modified to enable them to withstand more and more of such pesticides and herbicides. Increasingly, vital enzymes and other natural compounds are being destroyed by irradiation to "protect us" from natural crops. Our mineral depleted and over-farmed soils usually they have just a few petro-chemical synthetics added back to the soil which produce the best growth, but lack the best nutrients. Pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals have killed off the vital soil micro-organisms needed to convert what minerals do remain to usable forms to be taken up by the plants. Those micro-organisms which do remain seldom have adequate time to perform their vital roles thanks to over-farming and lack of proper crop rotation.

Today, most of us are deficient in most vital trace minerals needed for optimum health and many major minerals and vitamins as well. Thanks to the totally overboard scares about the danger of exposure to the sun, most of us are woefully deficient in Vitamin D3 - instead slathering on sunscreens which block out the beneficial rays, let in the harmful ones and contain carcinogens to boot. Most of us are similarly lacking in iodine, and many are lacking in selenium which, besides many other health benefits, is an important co-factor for iodine to be properly utilized. While many people diligently supplement with calcium via milk or supplements, as many as 95% of us are deficient in magnesium - and without magnesium being consumed/supplemented on a 1 to 2 or 1 to 3 ratio with calcium, the calcium does not work.

In great part, cancer is a defense mechanism where the cells mutate to protect themselves from a heavy metal, chemical compound, or other irritant/toxin. One of the things they do is form an outer protective shell which prevents the body's natural immune system from recognizing and killing off the cancer cells. Some have observed that this protective layer is getting thicker in many forms of cancer, possibly as a result of all the added toxins and other factors listed above. The end result is that cancer is more hardened against attack and is harder to recognize and defeat by immune systems that are most often in less than optimum condition to begin with.

In addition, the body's great toxin removal organ, the liver, is also often compromised and operating at far less than peak efficiency. Instead of a toxin removal organ, many people have developed fatty livers which are fat and toxin storage organs and which have bile ducts that fail to eliminate toxins but instead serve to recycle them through the bloodstream.

Perhaps the best of all the Mexican Clinics is the one established by Harry Hoxsey's protégé and partner, Mildred Nelson, an angel of healing who passed on in 1999. In her later years, she observed that their clinic was still having wonderful results with most forms of cancer, but cancers which once had been able to cured in only three weeks or so were taking up to six month or longer. I believe that what she observed is a perfect illustration of what I outlined above.

My own suggested comprehensive anti-cancer protocol (see "A Natural Anti-Cancer Protocol") may be overkill for some people. But I think it takes much more than just one cancer preventative or cancer fighter these days. That is why the wonderful Budwig protocol, once an almost sure cancer beater and still very successful, is considered an essential part of what I recommend, but far from the ONLY element.

With declining immune systems in an increasingly polluted, poorly nourished, overmedicated and toxic world, cancer is not getting easier to avoid and neither is it getting easier to beat. Cancer may be easier to beat than most people think, but that is only because most people still do not know a fraction of what good diet, nutrition, herbal supplementation and alternative treatments have to offer.

The more people who educate themselves about alternatives to ineffective and toxic therapies, the more that will be saved.

Our Disappearing Minerals and Their Vital Health Role

80% of the Packaged Food Items on Our Grocers Shelves Contain Ingredients Banned in Other Countries

A Natural Anti-Cancer Protocol

The Best Years in Life Cancer Alternatives Resource Page

Almost 900 child abductions were reported in the UK during 2014 alone. Statistics gathered from police forces indicate the numbers of cases are on the increase.

The study has shown kidnappings and abductions of kids and teenagers under 18 increased by 13 percent between 2012-2013 and 2013-2014. Kidnappings, if taken alone, soared by 18 percent over the same time, according to the research.

The figures were collected from the police and analyzed by the charity Parents and Abducted Children Together (Pact), the reported.

Between 2013 and 2014, 401 were abducted by people other than their parents (for instance, when a stranger lures a child in with sweets), 158 by an aggrieved parent, and 321 children were kidnapped.

Kidnapping is defined as the use of force or fraud to take a person and use them as a negotiation tool, and 20 percent of all kidnappings recorded by the UK police force have a child as a victim.

Abductions, on the other hand, are not necessarily carried out to start some kind of negotiation - a divorced parent may take their child in defiance of court orders. Sex offenders can abduct kids to satisfy their desires.

The numbers involve documented crimes, but Pact is sure many cases go under the radar of the police.

"While the increases in child abduction and child kidnapping offences have been relatively high, the actual incidence of these offences is still relatively rare. Including child kidnappings, 7.4 offences of child abduction or kidnapping were recorded per 100,000 children by police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland," the report stated.

Abductions and kidnapping rates are highest in Northern Ireland, with 11.6 cases per 100,000 kids. Elevated numbers are also demonstrated in London and Yorkshire and Humber: 9.8 and 9.3 respectively per 100,000. The lowest rate was in Wales: 4.5 cases per 100,000 children.

"Offences in Lancashire doubled (an increase of 20 offences) and Kent, North Yorkshire and Northumbria each recorded increases of 14 offences - at least three times the number recorded in 2012-13. These increases in offences recorded by small and medium-sized forces have led to some surprising findings in the rates of child abduction and kidnapping. Lincolnshire has a rate of child abduction/kidnapping 2.5 times the national average at 18.5 per 100,000," the study said.

Experts think the reason might be changing crime-recording practices, and the Rotherdam scandal, which has seen the way abductions and kidnappings are dealt with re-evaluated.

The Rotherdam scandal involved sexual abuse against girls as young as 12 between 1997 and 2013.

"It's a bit of a complex picture. In terms of recording, it's my guess that when faced with that scenario of no physical contact, some forces are recording a crime and some are not," Geoff Newiss, director of research at Pact, told the Independent.

"I would imagine that [Rotherham] is something to do with it. I wouldn't be surprised if forces are more sensitive now to the need to record what comes their way," he added.

Abductions by parents are infrequently recorded by police, the study found. Greater Manchester recorded only seven offences in 2013-14, while West Yorkshire recorded none.

However, George Newiss said he believed the figures and that he is "more suspicious of really low numbers than high numbers."

In response, a spokesperson for the Association of Chief Police Officers said: "There has been a considerable focus in the police service in recent years to improve crime-recording practices," which in turn has led to an increase in the statistics.

The Media Is "Run By A Tiny Group Of Politically Motivated Moguls", And "Controlled By The CIA"

While the US media is delighted to entertain the population with the latest diversionary "scandal" about what Rudy Giuliani may or may not have said about the president, to be replaced with another tabloid scandal in the next week and another the week after, things in the UK have suddenly become quite complicated as the entire facade of the media as one working on behalf of the "common man" and seeking to unearth the truth and publish "all the news that's fit to not anger one's advertisers" has come crashing down, in the aftermath of the Telegraph scandal which started last week when a "Political Commentator Quits Over HSBC Coverage, Accuses Telegraph Of "Fraud On Readers" followed by "Guardian Slams Telegraph Suggesting HSBC Coverage Was Biased Due To Owners' £250 MM Loan From Bank."

Which brings us to the following op-ed by the Guardian's Owen Jones. Ideological beliefs of the author aside, his observations excerpted below are a must read for anyone who still believes anything the mainstream media presents as "fact" or even merely insinuation, and why when receiving information from anyone, anywhere on any topic, total skepticism is the best and only appropriate response.

From "Peter Oborne’s resignation shows that the media shouldn’t just serve the rich"

By and large, Britain does not have a free press. Our media is not run by the government, and nor does it engage in widespread censorship. Instead, the media is run by a tiny group of politically motivated moguls, themselves in league with other private interests through advertising or personal networks. Journalists from non-privileged backgrounds are filtered out through unpaid internships and expensive post-graduate qualifications, ensuring the media is a closed shop for the well-to-do. According to a report published by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission last August, over half of the top 100 media professionals are privately educated. News coverage all too often reflects the priorities, concerns and prejudices of this tiny sliver of the British population. Rather than being a means to hold the powerful to account and fairly report issues, the media is the ultimate political lobbyist for our elite.

...

Columnists who support the political status quo are treated as thoughtful and nuanced; the tiny few that deviate are treated as predictable.

...

This doesn’t just go for the corporate-owned press. Detailed research by Cardiff University finds that the BBC is biased in favour of corporate and establishment voices. Its political coverage is dominated by former Tory or overtly rightwing figures; the Tories – including David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson – heavily recruit from Auntie Beeb. As anyone on the left who has appeared on the BBC will know, neoliberalism is its commonsense and starting point.

...

We desperately need more opponents of the status quo in the mainstream media. The reason we don’t have any is because – in our deeply compromised democracy – the media is so often there to serve the interests of the rich.

And if for some reason the "elite" don't get their way with media propaganda, there is always plan B. What is Plan B? For the answer see "German Journalist Blows Whistle On How The CIA Controls The Media."

Rosetta dips low into comet 67P's alien world

On Saturday, Valentine's Day, the Rosetta spacecraft dipped down low over the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. How low? At one point, it was less than from the surface!

Given that the comet is 4.3 kilometers long and shaped like a rubber ducky that's been sitting in the Sun for 4 billion years, this was a pretty low and gutsy pass. It was done to get extremely high-resolution pictures of the comet, of course, but the spacecraft will also be making a series of more distant passes to sample the environment the comet at different locations.

Around the time of closest approach, the lower resolution NAVCAM instrument was used to snap photos of the comet. One of them showed the very, very weird Imhotep region of the comet, and, well, see for yourself:

© Photo by ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM

Fantastic high-resolution image of the surface of the comet seen from less than 9 kilometers away.

Yeesh. What a mess! Imhotep is the name given to the broad, flattish area on the outer part of the bigger of the two lobes. The resolution on this image is staggering; it's about 0.76 meters per pixel. A human standing on the surface would be just under three pixels long.

As you can see, the surface is ragged, littered with boulders, some the size of houses. There are two features in particular I want you to see.

That's a closer view of the flat area at the upper left of the big picture (bear in mind I am not a cometologist, so I'm speculating a bit here; hopefully we'll hear more from the Rosetta scientists about these features). This may be where ice under the comet's surface is turned into gas when warmed by the Sun. As the gas escapes the comet, it leaves behind dust and gravel that can flow around; this may be a low spot in the surface that has been filled. Note the smooth area stops on the left just like water at a shoreline. But it's not like a liquid, really; note the sharp step in the middle, a scarp that may be a slight collapse feature, where the ground suddenly gave way. It looks to be a few meters high.

The cliff-like region at the upper left looks very much like it's been eroded, but not like it happens on Earth. There's no water flow! In this case, it seems more likely that as ice turned to gas, the material erodes back, into the cliff, leaving behind the rocky material. Also, those boulders may be chunks that have fallen and rolled into place, or been exposed as icy material around them turns into gas and blows away.

Another fascinating area is this one:

Note the layering! On Earth or Mars (y'know, normal places) I'd wager a feature like that is from sedimentary action; deposited season after season by rains and flooding bringing sediment into a lake. But on a comet? I'd guess that this represents the exact opposite: As the comet orbits the Sun on an ellipse, it gets farther and nearer to our star. When it gets closer, the ice near the surface turning to gas will drop the surface down a bit, and that stops as the comet moves away from the Sun. Then the cycle starts up again, over and over. The plateau is probably rockier material, exposed more and more every orbit as the ice goes away. Note also the circular crater-like features to the right. Those almost certainly aren't impacts! More likely they are where gas is escaping the comet, the pits forming and growing over time as the area around the venting region loses ice.

Comets are really strange. They have extremely low gravity, their orbits determine their seasons, their erosive properties are backwards. That's why I want to be clear with my caveats about not being a comet scientist! Places like this are hard enough to interpret by the experts, and my guesses might be wildly wrong. What I'm hoping to do here is to get you thinking about what you're seeing, and to understand that we've never seen a comet's surface in detail like this before. .

There's a huge amount to learn, and it's essentially all virgin territory, all alien and bizarre. Shakespeare was right: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

I've always interpreted that to mean Nature is more clever than we are, and we will always be surprised by what we find when we explore the Universe ... but we're clever too, and just because we didn't imagine something doesn't mean we can't figure it out .

Here are the photos of Nature's imagination. Now we let the science get to work.

If Congress doesn't act before February 27, the Department of Homeland Security is going to run out of money and go into a partial shutdown. (Eighty-five percent of employees would still be working, but they wouldn't be getting paid.) Congress doesn't appear to have a plan for action; as of last week, before it broke for recess, House and Senate lawmakers were each telling each other to do something. Meanwhile, politicians in both parties have already skipped to the step where they blame the other party for the possible shutdown — making them seem pretty resigned to it happening. House Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday he's "certainly" ready for a DHS shutdown.

It helps that both parties think they can win on the politics of a shutdown. Democrats see this as a replay of the government shutdown of 2013, when congressional Republicans tried to undo a major Obama administration policy (then Obamacare; now the president's executive actions on immigration) as a condition of keeping the government open. Republicans, for their part, appear to believe that because the Senate's Democratic minority is filibustering their funding bill, Democrats will take the blame — though there's little indication that they would become willing to roll back all of Obama's executive actions to end a shutdown. It's also not clear if Republicans could get a critical mass of support within their own party for anything less.

But the nonchalance with which both parties are treating the prospect of a Department of Homeland Security shutdown raises a big policy question: why does the department even exist?

The answer is that it shouldn't, and it never should have. DHS was a mistake to begin with. Instead of solving the coordination problems it was supposed to solve, it simply duplicated efforts already happening in other federal departments. And attempts to control and distinguish the department have politicized it to the point where it can't function smoothly — and might be threatening national security.

This isn't to say that DHS should be fully liquidated. The argument is there's no reason for it to exist as its own department when it can be reabsorbed into the various departments (from Justice to Treasury) from which it was assembled.

Since neither side is fighting to make the case for DHS, it's as good a time as any to look back over the agency's decade-plus-long history, and assess how the department's actually worked. The answer appears to be that the problems built deep in the department haven't aided national security — and might have damaged it.

DHS was doomed from the start

© Mike Theiler/Getty

Tom Ridge, the first DHS secretary, looks like he's about to high-five President Bush — but the White House left him hanging in more ways than one.

"I don't think (George W.) Bush was ever excited about the department," former Democratic member of Congress Jane Harman told The New Republic in 2009. But because it was "politically expedient," his White House went ahead with building a proposal for the new department in spring 2002 — and rushed the process, possibly to distract from revelations that the intelligence community could have prevented 9/11 if it had coordinated the information it already had.

If the point of DHS was to consolidate disaster prevention (whether natural or terroristic) and response under one roof, it failed miserably.

The process for deciding which existing agencies would be moved to DHS, and which ones would stay in other departments, was haphazard at best. According to a 2005 Washington Post article, the agency that supplies prosecutors in immigration court cases was moved to DHS; the agency that supplies immigration court judges, on the other hand, stayed in the Department of Justice. (The reason: the person in charge, a Harvard security expert working for Secretary-to-be Tom Ridge, simply hadn't known immigration courts were a thing, so hadn't looked for them.) When the White House team wanted a research lab for the new department, one of them phoned a friend to ask which of the Department of Energy's labs they should take — according to the Post , the team "did not realize that he had just decided to give the new department a thermonuclear weapon simulator."

The department's biggest problem, however, was that it completely failed to address the single biggest pre-9/11 counterterrorism failure. In fact, it made it worse. The 9/11 Commission Report (which came out after the creation of DHS) cited failure to share counter-terrorism intelligence and strategy as one reason the attacks succeeded. According to a 2011 Cato Institute report, the two primary agencies it singled out were the FBI and the CIA — neither of which was moved to DHS. (The FBI is still part of the Department of Justice; the CIA is still an independent agency.) So now, counterterrorism work is being done by agencies in three different departments.

A department of copycat programs

© Jim Watson/AFP

Just like this image of the US, counter terrorism responsibilities are cobbled together from a bunch of departments in the federal government.

This hasn't stopped DHS from trying to develop its own security capacity. It just means that whatever DHS does is already being done elsewhere in the government. And that duplication and fragmentation has made the national-security apparatus even harder to manage.

Take the example of equipment grants to state and local law enforcement. There were already two different federal programs to help police departments get equipment: the Department of Defense's 1033 program, which sends out surplus military gear to law enforcement (and requires they use it within a year), and the Department of Justice's Byrne grant program. But DHS now has its own set of grants to allow police departments to purchase military and other equipment. It's supposed to be used for counterterrorism, but (just as with the other grant programs) police often end up using the equipment for routine drug enforcement.

And as a recent White House report pointed out, having three different departments giving resources to local police has made it harder to track how those resources get used. If the Department of Justice, for example, finds out that a police department has been misusing funds or violating the constitution, it can cut off DOJ grant money — but the police department can turn around and apply for help from the Department of Defense and DHS.

Or think of "fusion centers," regional hubs supported by DHS to share information among multiple federal agencies and between state, local and federal law enforcement. The fusion centers aren't limited to sharing information about terrorism (they're also supposed to monitor other types of crime), but it's definitely a big component of their mission. The problem is that the FBI already has Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate terrorism, and Field Intelligence Groups to share information about it. In a 2013 study, the Government Accountability Office looked at eight cities, and found that the fusion centers in all eight cities overlapped at least partially with the FBI's counterterrorism work — and in four of them, there was nothing the fusion centers did that the FBI wasn't already doing. (There are also other things within DHS that overlap with fusion centers' other purposes.)

That means that at best, DHS' coordination work is redundant: a 2012 report from Republican Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) found that over a quarter of terrorism-related fusion center reports "appeared to duplicate a faster intelligence-sharing process administered by the FBI." (That's in addition to the reports that were based on publicly available information.) Because of that redundancy, dismantling DHS wouldn't necessarily help civil liberties — anything DHS is doing that infringes on them is also being done by other departments. But, just like with police grants, consolidating the agencies that might be infringing on civil liberties will at least focus efforts to hold them accountable.

At worst, DHS' work with fusion centers is actually hampering information sharing. A 2007 ACLU reporton fusion centers explained how this would work:

Most likely what is taking place is a power struggle in which federal agencies seek to turn fusion centers into "information farms"—feeding their own centralized programs with data from the states and localities, without providing much in return. The localities, meanwhile, want federal data that the agencies do not want to give up. For federal security agencies, information is often the key currency in turf wars and other bureaucratic battles, and from the days of J. Edgar Hoover they have long been loathe to share it freely.

Those turf wars also happen between federal agencies, including between the FBI and DHS. In 2009, a Homeland Security Today column warned that "we're operating the way things were before 9/11, where we uncovered the dots, but don't connect them in time."

Resistance from Congress and from its own employees

DHS has managed to distinguish itself from the other government agencies doing similar work — by becoming extremely politicized, both in its dealings with Congress and internally. It's become part of DHS' structure — again, in ways that have threatened national security.

The department has had to deal with so much congressional "oversight" that it's become unproductive. As of fall 2014, more than 90 congressional committees and subcommittees had some sort of oversight responsibility over some portion of DHS. For comparison, the Department of Defense has about 30 committees or subcommittees with oversight responsibility.

DHS officials need to spend enormous amounts of time preparing for congressional hearings and delivering research reports to members; that's time that can't go into directing DHS strategy, or managing the department. As former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a 2013 Annenberg Public Policy Center report, this can actually defeat the purpose of congressional oversight: "either the department has no guidance or, more likely, the department ignores both because they're in conflict. And so the department does what it wants to do."

But what does the department "want to do"? That often depends on whether "the department" means officials in Washington, or agents in the field. At DHS, the two groups are often in open conflict. Throughout President Obama's presidency, for example, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been vocally opposed to any effort from DHS leadership to reduce the risk of deportation for some unauthorized immigrants. So when DHS leadership tried to target immigration enforcement by issuing memos to ICE field offices about who they should and shouldn't "prioritize" for deportation, the offices often resisted or ignored those instructions — preventing the administration from actually being able to implement its policies. (As I've written before, this is arguably the biggest reason that the administration's shifted to granting "deferred action" to unauthorized immigrants, in 2012 and again in 2014.)

This intra-agency tension is likely a big reason that DHS agencies routinely rank near or at the bottom of the federal government in employee morale. (In the latest survey in December 2014, DHS ranked lowest among "large agencies," and ICE and two other DHS agencies shared the bottom three slots among all 314 agencies.) But it's also a security problem.

After repeated security breaches in fall 2014, former Secret Service agent Dan Emmett wrote for Vox about the problems with the agency's culture. The culprit he identified: the move from the Department of the Treasury to DHS. After that move, he said, the agency got politicized — and Secret Service leadership stopped telling White House staff when letting the president do something (like participate in a landing on an aircraft carrier) was a bad or unsafe idea.

DHS' "essential" employees aren't at department headquarters

At least one member of Congress, Rep. John Mica (R-FL), is talking openly about dismantling DHS. That's partly a smokescreen for a fight about the labor rights of DHS employees — which has been ongoing since Congress passed the Homeland Security Act in 2002, and decided the creation of a new department justified stripping a bunch of rights from the workers who'd be staffing it. (Many of DHS' labor regulations were later struck down in court.)

But Congress shouldn't let a partisan battle over labor relations distract them from taking a hard look at whether they still believe DHS is necessary. After all, the attitude of many members of Congress suggests that, while they're committed to many of DHS' functions, they're not as committed to the bureaucracy that oversees them.

Sure, when it's time to blame the other party, members of Congress are playing up DHS' importance: Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) called the shutdown fight "parliamentary ping-pong with national security," while Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) suggested building coffins outside the offices of Democratic Senators if a terrorist attack happened during the shutdown. But when they're talking about the actual consequences, Republicans, in particular, emphasize that over 85 percent of DHS employees would keep coming to work as "essential" government workers even if the department were shut down. "It's not the end of the world if we get to that time," Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) told Politico, "because the national security functions will not stop."

Those 85 percent are mostly front-line government workers: border agents, TSA screeners, etc. They're employees of the agencies who existed before DHS, and would continue to exist if DHS were dissolved. The employees at DHS headquarters, providing the centralized bureaucratic glue that's supposedly so important to coordinating our national security strategy? They'd be staying home in the event of a shutdown. The department's plan for the 2013 government shutdown had only 10 percent of the staff of the Office of the Secretary and the Office of the Undersecretary for Management "exempted" from the shutdown; 50 percent of the office of Analysis and Operations; and 57 percent of the National Protection and Programs Directorate (which didn't exist pre-DHS but encompasses a few pre-DHS offices).

Either those offices are fundamental to "national security functions," or they're not. Given the department's track record since its formation, Diaz-Balart is probably accidentally correct: it's not actually essential to national security that DHS, as a department, be running on a daily basis. But if he and other members of Congress are really so convinced that that's the case, they need to seriously consider disbanding DHS for good.

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