Homeland Security Gets an "F"

Two events happened in the last month that every American should find disturbing, because they demonstrate that Homeland Security Department under Janet Napolitano cannot get the job done.

The first event, Northwest Flight 188, involved a failure of the TSA to alert the Air Force when a commercial jet overshot its destination and went out of radio contact for an extended period of time.

Shades of 9/11.

Luckily there were no terrorists on the plane, but if there had been, the Air Force would have been unable to help, because it took the TSA 40 minutes to contact the Air Force after Flight 188 overshot it's destination and both pilots went out of radio contact. Plenty of time to crash the plane into the Chicago Sears Tower.

Homeland Security gets an F.

The second event, the shootings at Fort Hood, was a tragedy of the first magnitude and, in my opinion, it was completely preventable. The perimeter of a military base it its teeth and claws. Access to a military base is normally defended by barbed wire fences and armed guards. Persons allowed past those defenses are generally deemed to be trustworthy.

The statements made by Major Malik Nidal Hasan to his co-workers were warning enough. Do you want to trust your life to someone of questionable loyalty? Should Janet Napolitano's Homeland Security Department put our military personnel in a position of jeopardy by failing to filter out individuals of questionble loyalty?

I'm very sorry, but on the basis of these two incidents, it is time for Janet Nepolitano to go.

This is a no brainer.

The Department of Homeland security is not operating in a state of readiness. How do you maintain a state of readiness? Simple. You drill. You make a list of the likely security breach scenarios and you train for them. You write procedures for what people are supposed to do to detect and react to security breaches, and then you train people to follow those procedures. And then you drill. You have announced drills and you have unannounced drills; and you keep training records and you evaluate readiness.

The military drills and evaluates its readiness every day. Generals know how to do this. Homeland security under Janet Nepolitano obviously does not. If the military operated at the same state of readiness as the Department of Homeland Security under Janet Nepolitano, none of our troops would come home from Iraq or Afghanistan alive.

The job of Homeland Security, contrary to what Washington Bureaucrats, led by Janet Nepolitano, seem to think, is not to make a big show of harrassing people's grandmother's at airports; even though this is a high visibility activity.

Where did Janet Napolitano train to operate a Department of Homeland Security? I don't think she did. I don't think she's qualified for the job. Every day Ms. Napolitano stays on the job is another day American Military personnel and civilians are put needlessly at risk.