"The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost when the legislative power is nominated by the executive. - Edward Gibbon ( 1737-1794 )"

January 23, 2003 saw the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, the most significant realignment of the U.S. government in the last fifty years. Two weeks later, on February 6, 2003, Administrator Christine Todd Whitman established the EPA's Office of Homeland Security, fulfilling the Agency's need for a coordinating body. This 484-page Homeland Security Act (HSA) was pushed through Congress following 9/11, " to defend the US from further terrorist attacks." Its passage consolidated more than 20 existing federal agencies into a single Homeland Security Department, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Customs Service, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (ICE ). Not since President Truman created the Department of Defense in 1947 had the federal government undergone such dramatic restructuring.
The aim of this consolidation was to detect terrorist threats by removing information firewalls between government agencies, and centralizing, that unprecedented flood of surveillance data made possible by the PATRIOT ACT. Civil liberties groups objected strongly to the Homeland Security Act, contending that it reduced privacy, increased government secrecy and power and strengthened government protection of special interests.

The Total Information Awareness Office was the most controversial of the Act's provisions. TIA was given a startup budget of $200 million, and a mandate to achieve a state of "Total Information Awareness." Admiral John Poindexter, who had lied to Congress about his role in the Iran Contra affair, was placed in charge of the Office.

Under the HSA, any person or agency that voluntarily submit "critical infrastructure information" to a federal agency is assured confidentiality of the information and the source, and the supplier of the information cannot face prosecution based on vulnerabilities that the information revealed. The American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU) says the proof that HSA is determined to conduct massive surveillance on the American people is their "deep involvement" with Matrix, a private, Florida-based company which makes data-mining software that can access billions of private-sector records on American citizens in seconds.

Although the American people were told that the Homeland Security Act ( HSA) was a direct result of September 11, it is widely known that the Hart-Rudman Commission, (officially the "US Commission on National Security for the 21st Century"), created under Clinton in 1998, actually authored the blueprint for what became the HSA, and published it in a report called the "Road Map for National Security: Imperative For Change." Of the 14 members of the Hart-Rudman Commission, nine were members of the Council on Foreign Relations whose roster has included most of the neoconservatives populating the Bush Administration, including Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Robert Zoellich, George Tenet and Paul Wolfowitz.

In 2002, President Bush signed legislation to create a new Cabinet Department of Homeland Security, and appointed a former federal appeals court judge, Michael V. Chertoff as Secretary of Homeland Security

The inclusion of both ICE and FEMA under DHS has tended to militarize these two agencies whose previous interaction with the public had been exemplary and non confrontational. FEMA was absorbed into DHS as of 2003 and as a result, became part of the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate of Department of Homeland Security, employing more than 2,600 full time employees.

FEMA, which stands for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Originally conceived in the Richard Nixon Administration, was refined by President Jimmy Carter and given teeth in the Ronald Reagan and George Bush Administrations. FEMA had one original concept when it was created, to assure the survivability of the United States government in the event of a nuclear attack on this nation. It was also provided with the task of being a federal coordinating body during times of domestic disasters, such as earthquakes, floods. FEMA's performance, managed under HSA, during and after the New Orleans disaster has come under condemnation. Not only was the chain-of-command under HDA an example of costly malfunction, but also in the aftermath of the hurricane, the handling of housing, food supplies, transportation of the homeless and even emergency medical care, was widely criticized. Opening fire on supposed looters, military trucks roaming the New Orleans streets full of Blackwater employees, armed to the teeth and wearing camouflaged uniforms has never been explained, and as reported on KPFA on 20 December (FLASHPOINT), after the New Orleans City Council voted 7/0 to destroy some 40 units of public housing, FEMA officials began forcibly removing these mostly blacks both from their public housing and from thousands of FEMA-supplied trailers, eventually leaving well over 20,000 homeless and impoverished ( mostly blacks) to survive on the streets during the chill of the Christmas holidays.

The recent subordination of our long-established and efficient Immigration Service, (now ICE) under Michael Cheroff, is also encouraging the same inhumane militarization employed when he took over FEMA in the New Orleans disaster.

On November 10th. 2003 Homeland Security had Launched Operation Ice Storm (PHOENIX, AZ). Top law enforcement and government officials joined with the Department of Homeland Security to announce Operation ICE Storm, an unprecedented multi-agency initiative led by the Department's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to combat human smuggling and the violence it has generated in Arizona and nationwide. ICE Acting Assistant Secretary Michael J. Garcia laid out details of the effort, which includes the formation of a task force made up of federal, state, and local agencies, pledged to dismantle organized crime outfits that have turned human smuggling into a bloody but profitable venture.

This militarization of ICE, which organization had for years functioned without violence, played out in a New England town when, at 8:30 AM on March 6th, 2007, some 300 ICE agents raided a clothing factory on the New Bedford waterfront, with a warrant charging that the owner encouraged illegal immigrants to work. At least 300 workers who could not immediately prove they were in the country legally were initially detained, and most transferred to nearby Fort Divans for processing. These textile workers, mostly women from El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala and other Central American countries were all victims of our CIA- sponsored political and economic upheavals in their own countries. These workers' children in school during the raid, on returning home experienced the terror of forced separation from their parents, some of whom had already been flown away to prisons as far as Texas and Florida. (Many of the children, born in the US were US citizens.)

With a record now of over of over 140 such ICE raids, many kids of Mexican blood, rendered parentless, have been flown to orphanages set up in Mexico. KPFA (Flashpoint) recently reported one Mexican orphanage in the State of Sonora presently houses some 6000 ICE-orphaned children, many US citizens. A more recent example was reported on KPFA (FLASHPOINT) this December 20th when armed officers from ICE invaded the offices of an Oakland school, seizing a immigrant woman who was 8 months pregnant and had just dropped off her 6th-grader at the school. The women was forcibly taken into custody by the ICE officer.

Whether it's yanking poor black Americans out of public housing in New Orleans, or shooting Mexican immigrants in the mesquite along our southern borders, this militarism of FEMA and ICE is a threat to us all, and a blot on our humanity.


* Praetorian Guard: The Praetorian Guard was formed by the emperor Augustus to help prevent assassins from reaching the emperor. He made the Praetorians a standing force, and to avoid the appearance of despotism stationed only three of these cohorts in the capital, dispersing the remainder in the adjacent towns.