It’s zero dark hundred hours and I, a night person as always, am listening to some Al Stewart, sipping cognac from my celebratory Sarkozy bottle of Courvoisier VSOP with Peet’s Italian Roast on the side. Yeah, there is a Peet’s Coffee here in Chicago, in a mall on West North in Old Town. I used to buy all my coffee at Peet’s when I lived in San Francisco, and was surprised — no — speechlessly delighted to run into one in the mall when I went there to get a couple of things at Best Buy. I hadn’t known Peet’s had any locations outside California. YAY!

At any rate, having considerably more freed up time, I’ve been able do something I profoundly enjoy doing: Spending more hours in the Blogosphere and more at my favorite blogs, following links to other blogs I’d never heard of… It’s a continuous series of discoveries and opportunities to pick up information that is all but unavailable in the mainstream media. That isn’t to say that the MSM is always innacurate, they do become quite informative when one of their components is describing, in as detailed an account as possible, any secret U.S. national security strategies or other secret projects that help prevent terrorist attacks against America and Americans, here and abroad, military or civilian. To act responsibly and patriotically would go against the fiber of their liberal sensibilities, and that will not change until the grim realities of today’s world arrive at the portals of their Utopian abodes and, unfortunately, the rest of our front doors as well. Rather than accept responsibility, they’ll follow standard proceedures and blame it all on George Bush. Hmmm, sort of like the refrain of the theme song to the film Ned Kelly, “Blame it on the Kellys, boys, blame it on the Kellys…”

Being a protection professional (semi-retired) and an eternal student in the area of identifying and decisively addressing security concerns, I tend to take a great interest in all informed opinions and statistical analyses related to my field that I run across, as I expect most people do in their own areas of interest, which is why this article that arrived in my inbox earlier, a bit lengthy but a recommended read, grabbed my full attention.

We receive occasional reports from the Department of Homeland Security and from the Bureau regarding terrorist cells operating in America. The reason the administration created DHS, purportedly, was to prevent terrorism on our soil, and to that end they were given authority over all of our federal security agencies, then bloated with responsible charge of non-related issues like disaster management.

According to the TRAC report, very few arrests, prosecutions and convictions of terrorism related suspects (less than the proverbial drop in the bucket) have been executed since DHS was formed, while the lion’s share, by far, of Homeland Security’s activity lay in immigration venues.

While the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of government and the MSM force feed WE, THE PEOPLE meaningless and inaccurate platitudes promoting copious illegal immigration, amnesty and their by-products, all of which pose potentially disasterous threats to the economy and quality of life in America, and I will presume somewhat by adding the future of this nation as we know it to the list of likely casualties telling bald faced lies in the name of Uncle Sam {remember him?} working hand-over-fist to secure our borders (mostly the southern one, go figure).

With decent personnel and logistics budgets and accessing a little old fashioned inter-agency cooperation, Immigration could have dealt with that. Why was it necessary to place them under a higher authority?

Immigration related crime: Again, interagency cooperation, a reasonable operating budget, the lead agencies varying between FBI, DEA, INS, the Coast Guard, etc… Why pull them all under the umbrella of one overstuffed, underfunded government beauracracy?

Disaster Management? How did Hurricane Katrina become the red-headed stepchild of DHS? They should have been restricted to protecting the country from terrorism, not to also be fed crow over the tragic events brought about by an unforeseeable, naturally generated disaster.

But why, then, is there a DHS, anyway, instead of a well funded atmosphere of interagency cooperation? They sure as hell don’t seem to be producing any tangible results in the terrorism sector (acknowledging that there are operations and results that are necessarily kept secret, but given the tiny speck on the chart that represents anti-terrorist successes, it’s highly unlikely that the under-the-table stuff could have effected the statistics that voluminously).

I therefore find it somewhat alarming that such an entity as DHS even exists within our government. I would feel a bit more comfortable having our security agencies operating as individual organizations and, as I’ve said, cooperating.

Nope, not paranoia, just an observation, but one that could lead to quite a few scenarios, depending upon who is leading the nation, some of which we might not like…