Via Arms and Influence:

… Congress shoved the budget for the Department of State under the massive Department of Defense section of the budget. That’s more than a slap in the face for State, which should stand as a separate part of the executive branch. It’s also an excuse to trim or strip programs from the State Department because they appear to duplicate what DoD does.


Michael Kraft at The Counterterrorism Blog caught the first such casualty: the line item for the State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance Program. As Kraft notes, “The program provides a wide range of proven-valuable courses, ranging from airport security to bomb detection, hostage negotiation and to handling threats from weapons of mass destruction threats.” […..]

… The DoD is a very capable organization–but the people who head it (especially the ones in uniform) will be among the first to tell you that diplomacy is not their business.


And I’ll add that this is yet one more instance of Bushco squeezing the funding of homeland security-type programs. See “Bush Abandons Homeland For Battles Abroad.”


Kraft writes, “Foreign personnel trained under this program have thwarted or mitigated a number of attacks. For instance, Jordan, a major ATA participant, disrupted major attacks planned against American tourists during the December 1999 millennium threat.”


But, preventive measures are oh so less sexy than “shock and awe” and nuclear bunker busters. The fucking cowboy is truly all hat no cattle. He’s a steroid-stoked Stetson with no sense or sensibility.

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