Devastating Senate Committee Report on Fusion Centers

IIRC, after 9/11, the folks in DC in their great wisdom, decided the best way to eliminate the communication issues between federal agencies, was to create a whole new one.. Department of Homeland Security..

...put them all under the umbrella of DHS so intelligence efforts designed to prevent another 9/11 would not meet the same fate.

Now, after a two year review, the Senate committee has reported that there has been alot of wasted money on top of stepping on citizen's civil liberties, which has often been posted here on ATS..

The kicker? no significant useful intel was gathered...


Maybe we should lobby Congress to start up another agency to fix this one. /sarcasm

www.lawfareblog.com

Today the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations published this lengthy investigative report, which provides devastatingly negative answers to these questions with regard to Fusion Centers.

The Subcommittee Report is getting wide media coverage, and a lot of that coverage is predictably focused on important concerns about alleged waste and mismanagement of funds and about privacy or other civil liberties.

The Senate Committee press release..

www.hsgac.senate.gov

A two-year bipartisan investigation by the U. S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has found that Department of Homeland Security efforts to engage state and local intelligence “fusion centers” has not yielded significant useful information to support federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts.

“It’s troubling that the very ‘fusion’ centers that were designed to share information in a post-9/11 world have become part of the problem. Instead of strengthening our counterterrorism efforts, they have too often wasted money and stepped on Americans’ civil liberties,” said Senator Tom Coburn, the Subcommittee’s ranking member who initiated the investigation.

The investigation determined that senior DHS officials were aware of the problems hampering effective counterterrorism work with the fusion centers, but did not always inform Congress of the issues, nor ensure the problems were fixed in a timely manner.

You can download the entire report at the committee link, at the bottom of the article..

reply to post by JacKatMtn

Maybe we should lobby Congress to start up another agency to fix this one. /sarcasm

I like the idea of needing to lobby Congress to do the stupid thing that they will most likely do anyway.

reply to post by JacKatMtn


I think the article was way low on the dollar amounts ACTUALLY being spent and misleading on this article.......

Truth be told here are some figures estimated by the government on the costs.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for the American public to accurately gauge the size of the country’s domestic intelligence effort. Much of that effort is deservedly kept secret, as is the overall scope of America’s intelligence activities at home and abroad. The size of the national intelligence community is not precisely known, but in 2009 then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair described it as a 200,000-person, $75 billion per year enterprise.15 By the next year the intelligence budget had grown to $80.1 billion. That number is believed to be twice what it was in 2001, and it is considerably more than the $53 billion spent on the Department of Homeland Security in 2010.16

Domestic Intelligence Today: More Security but Less Liberty?

The Department of Homeland Security estimates that it has spent somewhere between $289 million and $1.4 billion in public funds to support state and local fusion centers since 2003, broad estimates that differ by over $1 billion. The investigation raises questions about the value this amount of funding and the nation’s more than 70 fusion centers are providing to federal counterterrorism efforts

Notice how the article (in your op) is only talking about the amount of money spent is "support" of state and local funding for these centers?

These differences just goes to show how much worse the situation in government spending on the "police state" actually is, versus the few crumbs our government officials and the MSM throw out to us......





EDIT: How sad! This topic should have EVERYONE in the US up in arms!!! I guess if a topic isn't about right versus left no one cares?

This is an agency, (Homeland Security, who emulates Adolph Hitler) who is spending billions if not trillions of taxpayer dollars to treat normal Americans as terrorists and no one is interested??? How sad........

reply to post by seeker1963


It's a very lively news day, funny how some of these serious matters surface under the wave of less important deals, like that 07 resurrection of the POTUS speaking at Hampton U..

Thanks for the additional info.. I was afraid to try and track down the actual total dollar investment made into this DHS Fusion deal..

I am almost out of aspirin

reply to post by JacKatMtn


Ha! lol Your welcome! What bothers me is they are only mentioning the cost of running and maintaining these centers in their investigation and leaving out the LARGER amount as to the cost of building all of them!

reply to post by seeker1963


I have a small list of people they could "house" in them -- Obama, Holder, Dodd, Frank .......