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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An insider topples the house of cards known as 'homeland security', May 3, 2006
This review is from: Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack (Hardcover)
"Homeland security" is now permanently part of the American government vocabulary. This phrase ideally means protecting the country from internal and international attack.
However, Clark Kent Ervin's scathing book documents numerous failings within the newly created Department of Homeland Security itself. Under funded and disorganized, DHS issues propaganda intentionally designed to make the American people feel 'safe' as opposed to taking real measures which would actually protect the country against another terrorist attack.
As was being practiced while he served as Inspector General, homeland security largely is a ploy to play on people's emotions. Truly effective policies require substantially more money, resources, and time than what the government itself invested.
We kid ourselves believing America is any safer today. Ervin meticulously documented how the government did just enough to keep people complacent (the airport security) but selectively 'forgot' other public areas where large groups of people are vulnerable to attack.
He does have the insider perspective, but I am also wondering if some of the harsh accounts of incompetence contained inside this book partially stem from unresolved inter-office politics. Plus, other authors already suggested that DHS and affiliated agencies (ahem..FEMA!) were a political dumping ground for administration buddies as opposed to a source for bureaucratic expertise.
Still, this is an overall excellent account of the very important differences between the government assuring people that we are safe and actually being safe. It is required reading for any American because we need to know the truth about the 'effectiveness' of homeland security policies.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Department of Homeland Security - A Bureaucratic Mess!, May 2, 2006
This review is from: Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack (Hardcover)
Ervin, former Inspector General for DHS, demolishes the myth that "DHS is doing a great job - no attacks since 9/11) by documenting vast gaps in security, even today. Further, he also notes that DHS leadership seemed more concerned with their reputations than protecting the country. For example, when undercover staff found it far easier to smuggle knives, guns, and bombs onto airplanes than it should have been, the head of TSA's reaction was that the IG's office was needlessly making TSA look bad, and making a mountain out of a molehill. (Backscatter x-ray machines have been recommended to make finding weapons carried on a person much easier to find - few have been installed.) After pointing out major flaws in port security that twice allowed shipping depleted uranium into the U.S., leaders essentially shrugged their shoulders. When the IG's office pointed out multiple instances of border inspectors knowingly admitting foreigners with stolen passports, they were told that it wasn't that big of a problem (only 19 terrorists caused 9/11). Secretary Tom Ridge also on at least one instance urged Ervin to keep Congress in the dark regarding his findings of waste and operational failures. Ervin tried for about a year to get an appointment with Ridge - finally Ridge's office called to request a meeting - supposedly to "get to know each other better." When Ervin showed up he found that the real purpose was to attack him for not being a team player, and he soon dropped off most everyone's meeting/mailing lists.
Dysfunctional organizational structure is a major issue - DHS' CFO lacked authority over component unit CFOs; similar situations existed in the purchasing, and information technology areas.
Another myths exploded by Ervin is the fact that most air cargo is not inspected - instead manifests are reviewed (screened). Similarly, with overseas container shipments - manifests are reviewed by U.S. staff (sometimes), with follow-up inspection conducted by LOCAL citizens (if at all, with questionable effectiveness).
Ervin also points out that less than one-fourth the required number of radiation detectors are available at U.S. ports - none in N.Y., and the ones in N.J. cannot tell the difference between natural radiation (eg. cat litter, ceramics) and enriched uranium.
Somewhere between $18 and 20 billion has been spent on incompletely securing aviation, but only $250 million for mass transit. Securing our food and water supplies, malls, sports arenas, etc. has merited even less attention.
Then there is the matter of visas and passports. Citizens from 27 nations with close relations to the U.S. can enter the U.S. without a visa. Yet, between 1/02 and 6/04, 56,943 passports were reported stolen - mostly from these nations. Instead of seizing stolen passports being used to attempt entry, we give them back so that the individual can return to wherever they came from. Congress specifically requested that DHS established specially trained Visa Security Officers (VSOs) to Saudi Arabia to better screen applicants - this took 9 months after the President's approval, and only one of the ten could speak Arabic. (Ridge belittled these findings.) Further, the VSOs spent most of their time entering data into DHS computers that already had been entered in State Dept. databases.
Those entering the U.S. from Canada or Mexico are "screened" only by running license plate checks (worthless). In 2004 there were 44,617 individuals caught on the Southwest border that were other than Mexican - many/most are released due to a lack of holding space.
"Open Target" is a great service to those interested in real security.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Spinning security issues, May 7, 2006
This review is from: Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack (Hardcover)
One of the most telling anecdotes in Open Target is based on when author and former Department of Homeland Security inspector general Clark Kent Ervin released a report in 2003 indicating that 40% of the deadly bomb parts and weapons government agents tried to sneak through airport security got through. With the distressing information in the public forum, Department of Homeland Security head Tom Ridge called Mr. Ervin into his office for a closed-door conference. But it wasn't to lament the unfortunate statistic, or to discuss ways to remedy it. Instead, Mr. Ervin says, his boss berated him for his conclusions and finally asked: Why couldn't you have at least said we were 60% successful? Wouldn't that have sounded much better?
That is the devastating theme of Open Target in a nutshell: that the United States' efforts to stem the threat of a terror attack is based on creating certain impressions, demonstrating bravado about being proactive, and, most importantly, to help rationalize extreme steps taken elsewhere.
Mr. Ervin is not a gifted writer, but he does effectively sound the alarm about where risks lie, and he goes on at great length about how they can be stemmed. His suggestions are not high-tech or complicated plans but rather critical but common sense approaches that in many cases simply require the expense of a little shoe leather from agents in the field. He suggests, for example, checking all containers arriving to U.S. ports, securing soft targets like athletic stadiums and water supplies, cross referencing databases of suspected extremists, and encouraging coordination between territorial agencies like the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, local and state police, the Pentagon, and the Department of Homeland Security.
It's hard to read Open Target and not be appalled and frightened by how astonishingly vulnerable the U.S. seems to be, at least from Mr. Ervin's perspective.
I brush aside one criticism I've read of the book, which is that Mr. Ervin was simply providing potential extremists with a laundry list of targets on the susceptible American underbelly. I had that critique in mind when I started the book -- but as I worked my way through it I realized that the vulnerabilities Mr. Ervin points out are so obvious that while it's beyond belief that security forces haven't worked harder to limit the risk, it's also very unlikely that hostile forces hadn't thought of them long ago.
One critical appraisal that does give me pause is Mr. Ervin's own point of view. He finished his 18-month stint as the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general in 2004, when Congress would not confirm him. He says the reason was that he was too effective in pointing out mismanagement and security lapses that legislators preferred not to have so much attention called to those failures. I can't say whether Mr. Ervin's assessment is correct or not, but while reading Open Target it is each to imagine that part of the author's reason for writing the book may have been to settle the score with those who wouldn't let him do the job he wanted to do and appeared ready to do well. If that's true, it's easy to understand, but it also undermines the book by coloring every assertion with a brush dipped in personal resentment.
Those aren't the kinds of overtones I'd select for a book like this one, but I also wonder whether anyone with the knowledge to write a book like this could do so without being involved. Perhaps that involvement is a necessary weakness.
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