Homeland Insecurity

President Bush has said that he isn't concerned with finding Bin Laden, and the CIA unit dedicated to apprehending him has been disbanded. Reported in today's New York Times, our Homeland Security director tells us that Al Qaeda/Bin Laden want to bankrupt the country, therefore we can't protect ourselves against terrorists on the home front.

What about the estimated $2,000,000,000,000 (yes, that's trillion) dollars that the war in Iraq is currently estimated to eventually cost us? That would go a long way toward boosting our security at home, securing our ports under U.S. supervision and charting a course to energy independence, with enough left over to find Bin Laden and quell terrorist cells around the world.

Will the U.S. voters wake up, and refuse to send Republican incumbents back to Washington, or will they buy into this nonsense?


From Today's New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 — Congress and the American public must accept that the government cannot protect every possible target against attack if it wants to avoid fulfilling Al Qaeda’s goal of bankrupting the nation, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate committee Tuesday.

Osama bin Laden, Mr. Chertoff said, has made it clear that scaring the United States into an unsustainable spending spree is one of his aims. In a 2004 video, Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader, spoke of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”
“He understood that one tool he had in waging war against the United States was to drive us crazy, into bankruptcy, trying to defend ourselves against every conceivable threat,” Mr. Chertoff said at a hearing of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “We have to be realistic about what we expect and what we do. We do have limits, and we do have choices to make.”