Republicans Are Hopelessly Bad At Keeping You Safe

by tristero

Yesterday, I blogged about a Republican governor, now presidential candidate, who was so ignorant and fanatically ideological that he enthusiastically worked to free a serial rapist and murderer, stupidly and tragically providing him an opportunity to rape and kill one, if not two, more victims. That should give anyone pause about the rightwing’s persistent claim that they, because they are illiberal and not distracted by humanistic niceties, can keep America safe.

Last night, I picked up the latest issue of Wired and read an article about a housewife who spends her spare time entrapping terrorists. It is a very interesting but strange article. While it posed for me a number of questions regarding how much of it is real, how much of it a deliberate plant, and how much might be disinformation,* let us take it at face value for now. What do we learn?

Ostensibly, we learn that an amateur, in her spare time, self-educated herself in Arabic, the geography of the Middle East, and the mores of radical Islamists, became a regular presence in their cyber-hangouts, and conned at least four very seriously creepy individuals into a close, lasting relationship – albeit involuntarily so – with divers manifestations of American law enforcement.

More importantly, we learn that, even today, the arrest and conviction rate of members of al Qaeda and associates is incredibly low; that the FBI computer system is hopelessly busted; that when an FBI agent wants to set up a Yahoo account, s/he has to ask permission; and that FBI agents, at least in Montana don’t have Internet access and have to go to the local library to sign on.

And that immediately raises the question of how the hell, after some 6 years of Bush’s oversight of national security, that Republicans can pretend to be keeping us safe.

And it raises the further question of what the hell Republicans think they’re doing with all that data mining, illegal wiretapping, retroactively immunizing telcos, and so on. I’m not sure they’re entirely aware that you need at least a computer and a phone line to collect much of this data and that it helps if you have access to something called broadband. And once you collect all that info, how y’gonna store it? On a big stack of floppy disks?

Let me cut to the chase. Assuming the people in the article are describing the situation at the FBI in an accurate manner, then Democrats have an opportunity to create a perfect storm around the issue of Republican incompetence at national security. There surely are no laws that forbid the FBI from signing on to the Internet from their offices, although there may be some security regulations that should have been revised a long time ago. Ditto, the kind of paperwork required to open up a Yahoo account.

I’m not suggesting that these things should be as casually easy for the FBI to do in an official way as they are for the average citizen; obviously, we’re talking investigations and procedures here. But let’s face it. For an FBI agent to be forced to use the local library for internet access is insane. But it is precisely the kind of insanity we have come to expect from Republican management of the resources of the United States government. Anyone remember those pallets of cash that were misplaced in Iraq? Or the apparently quite accidental transport of nuclear weapons recently? Or, dare I say it, the summer of 2001?

It is an indication of how inept Republican administrations are at national security that FBI’s dangerously bad failures of their high tech still exists, apparently, today. It is also an indication of how little the powers Bush is demanding Congress cede to him have to do with keeping this country safe.

Finally, both the neglect of basic national security needs and the obsession with unconstitutional, intrusive spying demonstrate how deeply committed Bush and the Republican Party is to undermining the very structure of the American government and transforming this country permanently into an authoritarian state.

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*I am not casting any aspersions on the reporters here. I have no reason to doubt that Jack Hitt and Will Sedlack reported honestly what they saw and what they were told. But when you think about the details… I have questions. One example: There are probably enough clues in the story for an American sympathetic to al Qaeda to locate Rossmiller, or other characters mentioned, even assuming she lives in a state other than Montana. Then, there is Rossmiller’s remarkable ability to understand Arabic and converse with terrorists despite having picked up the language cold only 6 years ago and having, apparently, no one to practice with other than while on the job – ie, while trying to convince terrorists she’s a native Arab speaker.

All of this, and more, could pose questions not about the reporting, but rather about what the reporters saw and didn’t see. However, in the absence of more information, there is no truly convincing reason to consider the story as anything other than exactly what it seems to be: the story of an amateur counter-terrorist who may be doing a better job than the FBI.