Want to stop terrorists? Publicly ID DHS operatives & practice non-cooperation with the same. Want to shut down the war machine? Stop providing the $$ through non-payment of "voluntary" Federal Income Tax. Warning: The price of passive resistance is very steep. Not recommended for families with dependent children or with hope for the future.

If you want to improve relations with Arab countries, wouldn't it be sensible to have an American Arab? Even a Mulsim.

IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE

Here's one Red Cell member who put it on his resume and posted it online. Click the link and search "red cell." It's not a list of members, but it's a start.
www.mtsu.edu/~jubenvil/sports_management/vitajube.htm

I spoke with a public information officer with DHS. She said that it's up to individual red cell team members whether they would like to be publicly identified, and that Homeland Security will not make a complete list of red cell team members publicly available.

An improvised explosive device can be made from any item under the sun. The fact that we issue bulletins on this issue to the general public or general law enforcement staggers me. Any bomb tech in the US, and there are over 2,000,or any veteran can tell you that a pressure cooker, a ballpoint pen, or a dang toothpick could be made into an IED, given enough time and effort. What matters is the level of threat, the IED's effectiveness, and availability of material. We have millions of pounds of conventional commercial explosives NOT recovered by ATF. Which brings up the question, If you didn't work Alcohol, and didn't work Tobacco and Firearms, why are you adding Explosives to your name? But I digress into reality. We have Iraq chock full of HE and have huge casualties from IEDs which consist of a cap, a little plastic, and an artillery round. Anyone worried about pressure cookers ought to spend more time on their meds.

But no, an analyst at DHS publishes a bulletin. Here are some suggestions for future bulletins for DHS, since these have already been covered in Bomb Tech bulletins for years: 1) Exploding toilets (done), (2) exploding floral gifts delivered by a mime (done), (3) exploding electronic Christmas cards (done), etc. etc. The list is endless. So we must be paying by the bulletin. Publish or perish: Our 10,000 analysts must produce.

Well, a bit of a cheap shot -- you have to use some imagination in government -- in fact, the lack of imagination is a much greater issue for me. I'm glad some creative people are involved in some brainstorming on potential threats. By the way, as someone who's just come back from two years in Nepal, pressure-cooker bombs are the weapon of choice of the Maoist insurgency there and have killed many people and created a fair amount of panic. What sounds ridiculous on its face may actually be sensible upon deeper examination, and pressure-cooker bombs are simple and deadly and serious.

Bush has not learned. The Post has a nice story on the nominee for Immigration and Customs (part of Homeland Security http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR2005091901930.html) , a post one would think would be very important these days. Well, this 36 year old has the following credentials besides being a lawyer and no customs and little management experience for such a post:

Her uncle is Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She married Chertoff's current chief of staff, John F. Wood, on Saturday.

Now, does anyone wonder what one must do to get nominated for a post in this administration? It doesn't pass the smell test. If the Senate ok's this nominee we really have a problem on our hands. Once again Chertoff's cronism is apparent and dangerous. Chertoff must go...

A close friend worked with Booz Allen as a consultant during the Vietnam war, during which contract the team concluded that the systems that would work in setting up an efficiently operating government were impossible in the situation because South Vietnamese weren't able to operate under them, because ... they were South Vietnamese in temperament. For this the group and BoozAllen got paid. Hey, at least they did invent Booz. REally,with little commemorative Booz bottles.

Glad to see the Red Cells have G. Gordon Liddy on the team. He's helpful.

"There are just so many warnings about so many areas covering so much of the day-to-day life of America. The cumulative effect is to provide no useful warning at all"

It seems this is a general problem with our modern "information" society. We have too much information to manage. If we had a better way to rank and prioritize information according to importance, it would be good. It's like those levees in New Orleans. Too many other, less important projects were screaming for attention, so the levees were neglected.

We need to create an accurate and unbiased heirachy of important issues and allocate resources accordingly.

Before the hurricane hit New Orleans, I predicted to family and friends that the FEMA relief effort would be a disaster, and that FEMA would attempt to paper over its failings with a blizzard of press releases trumpeting the details of its too little, too late approach. My prediction was on the money. How did I know?

Three years ago, I worked on a contract with FEMA to improve one of their internal information systems. The officials with whom I worked were career GS 12s-15s. These people had no idea what their information system was supposed to do, what was deficient in it, how it was configured, how it was supposed to be configured, what measures might be needed to improve it. But they wanted this undocumented system, with unknown configuration answering unspecified requirements to be tested, operational and fully documented in 6 weeks.

FEMA personnel spent most of their time, and much of my staff's time, in meetings in a "secure location" at which nothing substantive was ever decided.

What saved my staff was that the FEMA IT staff were unaware that our contract was running out. FEMA IT discovered on Sept 29 that the contract expired Sept 30. They went to their contracting shop, stating that this was an emergency. The contracting officer, bless his-her heart, told FEMA IT that lack of planning on their part did not justify an emergency on the part of the contracting shop. My staff was released from this train-wreck of a project.

My lesson from this train-wreck was that the FEMA business model cannot handle anything that is not an emergency. And once something is identified as an emergency, FEMA practices the "mythical man year": if it takes one person a year to accomplish a task, putting 2080 people on the task should get it accomplished in an hour.

FEMA should change its name to FUBAR.

Folks, don't just look at DHS budget items. Look at all budget items for agencies that have significant responsibilities for infrastructure in the U.S. (like levees and dams).

The post 9/11 attitude has been of protection and security. But when an agency has 300+ items of aging infrastructure - how do you protect all of it? And Congress says you can only spend $ on protection and security. There's no authority to spend on rapid-recovery investments in case of infrastructure failure. Professionals in agencies have their hands tied by authorizing language. Who writes that language? Congress. Or some half-wit aide who has never seen an infrastructure project in his/her entire life.

Don't just look at DHS. Look across all agencies to see how they spent their 'protection and security' funds. And see what kind of 'analysis' they used to formulate their strategic approach. It's pretty pathetic. I should know, I work for one of these agencies.

I am a survivor of the Booz-Allen led reorganization of the IRS. This "quality job" took three years, several task forces and cost the Service some millions of dollars, in fees for Booz and for travel so all the participants could get trips to DC. It should be a basic of Life in DC that the minute the Boozers are involved, nothing useful will result, and all sensible people should head for the bar.

You can fire the appointees but just as in any large organization someone had to "place" them in their position and should be held accoutable for doing so. We hold corporate officers accountable for crimes committed by years in jail....when will George Bush be held accountable for his misdeeds...

I grew up a Republican in the mid-west in the 50's and this administration and its hanger-ons are not and will never be Republican in anything but name only. George and his fellow travelers holding ideas so far different from most real Americans and the thinking that made this country great for 200 plus years simply stole a party for their own personal use. For them far too much comes before country and common sense. Tolerance for fellow Americans has been pushed out entirely in favor of agenda specific issues that for the history of this country were left to individuals to decide on their own. The fiasco at FEMA and within DHS is merely the tip of the iceberg. If you do not think it can be worse, dig deeper within any Executive Department.

Brownie quit too early. I thought he was next in line for the "freedom medal". Who knew he had a conscience and understood that he screwed up - unlike the other "It is a slam-dunk" Bush appointees.

busyhands:

Right. Thanks for putting that straight. Brownie resigned, he was not fired as he should have been. Here's what Chertoff said about him being relieved of his New Orleans oversight duties on Sept. 12:

"Other challenges and threats remain around the world," and Brown is needed to prepare for those, Chertoff said at a news conference in Baton Rouge.

What a crock of ... Chertoff ought to resign too. He's as unqualified for his job as Brownie was for his. When is anyone going to pay attention to the lack of qualifications amongst Bush's appointees? Are we only going to find out how bad these individuals are when their screw ups cost lives?

Sully, "Brownie" did resign but that doesn't change the fact that many of his subordinates who are equally un-qualified are still in place.Your suggestion to have a media organization do a comparative analysis is a great idea! We should all e-mail the editors of the various publications we enjoy and ask them to do just that.Who knows what response we would get.

Sully, "Brownie" did resign but that doesn't change the fact that many of his subordinates who are equally un-qualified are still in place.Your suggestion to have a media organization do a comparative analysis is a great idea! We should all e-mail the editors of the various publications we enjoy and ask them to do just that.Who knows what response we would get.

Hey, I'm disgruntled. However, I'm not certian exactly how high my level of disgruntlement is because DHS has not paid MTV divas, rappers, rock stars and hip hoppers to produce a color coded, disgruntlement level reference system. How am I supposed to know how much of a threat I am to Homeland Security without a reference chart? I am certian that if Aldridge Ames, Robert Hanssen, Tim McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, the anthrax letter terrorist et al., had a color coded disgruntlement refererence chart, they would have immediately called the DHS and turned themselves in. Oh, the humanity! I hope someone at DHS reads this post before it is too late. I hear the Chinese have a few extra billion dollars they are looking to invest somewhere.

At least pressure cookers are a step up from Tupperware.

As the old Russian proverb told us that fish rots "from the head down"; sure enough the "great job Brownie" ethic remains strong and steady at HSD. Out in Washington state, Region 10 Director John Pennington was found to have pungled up his academic record from a diploma mill in California. He remains on the job, a man without any disaster experience applicable to HSD,a Bush political appointee who may have been good at selling coffee, his previous job. God help this nation and the Pacific Northwest....we worry a lot about a 9.0 magnitude earthquate just waiting to happen off the Washington-Oregon coast. Yep, Brownie, pass that coffe in our direction please.

It has been nearly 23 years since I was a student (among many) at the Dynamics of International Terrorism (DIT) course that was conducted at Hurlbert Field, Florida.
There was no knowledge of a "9/11" tactic back then, but 19 years later this country and its anti-terrorism experts of the new day learned. Second-guessing what these experts of today have to brainstorm is a worthless exercise. If critics can do better, get off the editorial page and head for the nearest anti-terrorism center and add your knowledge-free up the news.

The red cell operation needs to take a reading on the B---sh-- indicator - it was overflowing ages ago in this administration.

graysmoke

This newest blog reminds me of something I read 30-odd years ago in a Thomas Pynchon novel entitled "Gravity's Rainbow." That novel began in 1944, when V2s rained down on England without warning--the first supersonic ballistic missiles. There was a secret agency entitled "The White Visitation," which attempted to use everything from necromancy to coprophilia to attempt to predict where the V2s would come down. However, the GI clerical protagonist protagonist of the novel, Tyrone Slothrop, has a map of Greater London on his office wall with pins placed where he managed to have sexual intercourse--and these pins later coincided with V2 hits! This causes Slothrop to be dubbed "Rocketman" and sends him into Germany to probe the Nazi rocket effort, including subterranean rocket factories staffed by gay concentration-camp inmated (of KZ Dora).
If only our Department of Homeland Security made as much sense as this novel! What the FEMA debacle has illuminated is that "homeland security" (a phrase chillingly out of the Nazi past--"Heimat" was a term beloved of that lot) is really an attempt to cheapjack national defense and disaster control. We can see it at the airports, where the majority of coach-class travelers are hassled, their unlocked luggage pilfered, and even valuables that are put in cups for x-ray inspection are pilfered, while private jets seem to have little or no security inspections for their passengers. Don't people know that a Gulfstream or its like, taking off from Teterboro, can repeat 9/11? Don't people know that contraband can be planted in unlocked luggage that will land you in Gitmo (our version of a concentration camp)?

This newest blog reminds me of something I read 30-odd years ago in a Thomas Pynchon novel entitled "Gravity's Rainbow." That novel began in 1944, when V2s rained down on England without warning--the first supersonic ballistic missiles. There was a secret agency entitled "The White Visitation," which attempted to use everything from necromancy to coprophilia to attempt to predict where the V2s would come down. However, the GI clerical protagonist protagonist of the novel, Tyrone Slothrop, has a map of Greater London on his office wall with pins placed where he managed to have sexual intercourse--and these pins later coincided with V2 hits! This causes Slothrop to be dubbed "Rocketman" and sends him into Germany to probe the Nazi rocket effort, including subterranean rocket factories staffed by gay concentration-camp inmated (of KZ Dora).
If only our Department of Homeland Security made as much sense as this novel! What the FEMA debacle has illuminated is that "homeland security" (a phrase chillingly out of the Nazi past--"Heimat" was a term beloved of that lot) is really an attempt to cheapjack national defense and disaster control. We can see it at the airports, where the majority of coach-class travelers are hassled, their unlocked luggage pilfered, and even valuables that are put in cups for x-ray inspection are pilfered, while private jets seem to have little or no security inspections for their passengers. Don't people know that a Gulfstream or its like, taking off from Teterboro, can repeat 9/11? Don't people know that contraband can be planted in unlocked luggage that will land you in Gitmo (our version of a concentration camp)?

What a bunch of Crap !!! Can't anybody do anything about this ???

That the DHS has G-2'd every possible eventuality does not surprise me. What continues to suprise me is that anyone out there reads such crap. We did the same thing at the Pentagon. Planned for the invasion of every country on earth and then filed the darn thing. Grenada was a good example of piss-poor planning.

That we will find ourselves again being the victim of a terrorist act is a given. Let's go proactive and seriously attempt to nip it in the bud. Does anyone out there really believe that our intelligence agencies do not have a good handle on where Bin Laden is presently setting up house? Can you say Pakistan? But of course we must bolster the government in Islamabad, hence nothing is done to bring Bin Laden to justice.

The goings on at DHS are symptomatic of the goings on at FEMA, Pentagon and other agencies and ambassadorships where cronies with no expertise are "doing their best" to protect America. I know other presidents have done this, but the freaking ambassador to France doesn't even speek french! Chertoff is a lawyer. His background ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chertoff )has nothing to do with DHS's mission (http://www.dhs.gov/dhs/images/themeTitle_DHSOrganization.gif ).

Its time the Senate, which approved many of these unqualified people begins to do its job of oversight. The notion of the president having to "live with" his choice no longer cuts it. We all have to live with the choice, which is why the Constitution requires approval by the Senate.

I'd really like to see the Post or any other media organization do a comparative analysis of appointees and their backgrounds, and the votes of the Senate to approve. I think it would be very eye opening. By the way, why isn't the Post overtly reporting that "Brownie" is still in charge of FEMA? I have found that most of my friends thought he was fired.

This is another cheap shot. I doubt a workshop like this cost more than $100K or so. Wow, big deal. Is this really the biggest waste of money in the Federal government right now? Hell, no. I am much more incensed about the corruption down in Louisiana over the past 40 years that has wasted BILLIONS of dollars that should have been spent on preparing for a level 5 hurricane.

On a philosophical level, there is nothing wrong with brainstorming various threats. The terrorists are, without a doubt, constantly brainstorming new ways to attack, and if we don't think seriously about what they might do, we won't know what to look for so we can stop them. Before 9/11, I am sure you'd regard a workshop that concluded that terrorists might crash planes into buildings as an absurd waste of money ("how totally implausible, that would only happen in a bad Hollywood action movie!") but EXACTLY this type of brainstorming might have focused some serious attention on the problem and developed some warning indicators (e.g., terrorists in flight school) before it actually happened.

Holy cow, Batman! Culinary Counterterrorism. After spending the weekend locking up enraged victims threatening to blow up relief agencies, I learn our Washington Brain Trust has determined the real threat: Cuisinart and Farberware. Yes, the 800 analysts in the FBI and the 58,000 analysts in DOD and DHS are well employed. Let's hire a million more. The US Counterterrorism Strategy: Paralysis by Analysis. God, good thing we hired some "deep thinkers" from the analytical pool (the shallow end unfortunately). I'm sure the Agents, operators, and groundpounders can expect future relevations from the Beltway Bandits and "Intelligence Directorates". We have met the enemy and it is us. Did the Agents and case officers see this type of garbage coming? You bet. But we just have to go out and stop the bad guys and rescue the stranded after the analysts and "executives" plan to fail (or was it fail to plan?). The analysts, as always, sit back and emanate such pearls of wisdom.

http://www.redcellassociates.com/about.htm

Become an associate to get the inside story!

On one hand, it's truly easy to make wise ass remarks about the stupidity of DHS as exemplified by this dopey report. Several crossed my mind. But what is frightening is that we are helpless to stop this crap. FUnds that could've bolstered the New Orleans levees and a more rapid response from FEMA are being sucked up by DHS to enable political appointees and their butt-smoochers to get jobs at the expense of people and programs that need that funding.

What a bunch of cruds.

Should I be concerned? I am a resident alien who has a "Western appearance" and although I don't have a pressure cooker, I do own both a crock pot and a large roating pan with a lid. I am worried that DHS may send me to Gitmo.

"Millions for Meetings Not a Penny for People." The new DHS motto developed with taxpayers' dollars by "out of the box" thinkers after at least ten meetings.