Well, I didn't say it above a whisper (around here), but I was not in favor of establishment of either DHS or the DNI.
The rationale I used was that certain powers are required during wartime, but structural changes are dangerous because of administrations that would come in later and abuse it (I was thinking about Hitlery at the time...Bambi was not even imaginable in my worst nightmare)
Also, IIRC, Bush did what he did with Gitmo exactly because he knew that constitutionally he couldn't do so within CONUS.
But, since Congress and the Press are total Ø lapdogs, this won't ever meet more than Page A-18 coverage.
I don’t recall this site being a hotbed of enthusiasm for DHS. We all knew what it would be like, and it was a PC pile of cr@p right from the word go, with that Tom Ridge who looks like he’s deaf, to Count Chocula himself, Michael Cherktoff.
I was never very keen on the Department of Homeland Security, and it seems to me that people in the forum were generally uncomfortable with it.
There were at least three problems with it:
1) It set a dangerous precedent for the future, if clinton or someone like him got back into the White House and abused the powers.
2) It was not a real security measure, but simply piled bureaucracy on top of bureaucracy in layer after layer. But underneath that, the CIA and the FBI were still largely broken.
3) Airport security was put under a government union, everone’s pay was doubled, and nobody could be fired for incompetence. We’ve seen what that has gotten us.
Bush did try hard and mean well, and for whatever reason there were no more 9/11s under his watch, for which he surely deserves credit. But the solutions were far from ideal.
And the difference between DHS or NSA or the FBI doing this is?
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
I love the cognitive dissonance being suffered by leftists towards their favorite son, Obama! They call Bush a Nazi but they watch in growing fear and realization that Obama is the Nazi they have always feared as coming from the right is instead coming from the left. Their growing angst is something akin to a Christian scientist suffering the pangs of acute appendicitis while at the same time, their religious views are telling them the symptoms are all in their minds!