This morning I had CNN droning on in the background while getting ready for work. I noticed Clark Kent Ervin being interviewed by Soledad O’Brian, not paying much attention in the rush.
Who is Clark Kent Ervin, you may ask.
He was the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security until December 2004.
So what, you may ask.
Please follow below:
Back home tonight, I googled Mr. Ervin to see what the interview was about. I could not find a transcript, but found many references to his new book (which I was unaware of), “Open Target:Where America is Vulnerable to Attack”.
I found a link to his blog, with this:
Welcome to the blog for my new book, “Open Target:Where America is Vulnerable to Attack.” I served as the very first Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, from the day the doors opened , January 24, 2003, until my presidential appointment expired on December 8, 2004. During my time in office, it was my job to determine how well the department was carrying out its mission of protecting the nation from a future terror attack. Sadly, I found that the country was still dangerously unprepared, and that there were numerous gaps in our defenses that terrorists could easily exploit. But, rather than attacking the problems and working overtime to close these security gaps, the department’s leaders worked overtime to attack me.
That caught my attention, since I had posted here at BT more than a year ago:
Now ex-IG Ervin states that Ridge tried to make him spin his reports to Congress.
I profess no knowledge beyond what this amNY-article stated and what I found on some links, but it seems that the DHS and the Administration are extremely eager and vigilant in ensuring a lid on things.
What’s going on?
And in the first comment:
Is a replacement in place?
Has anyone been nominated?I tried to look, this was my first hit:
Vacancies in the DHS Inspector General’s Office. An incredible number of vacancies for what seems to be fairly senior positions. Maybe they’re not too keen on inspecting themselves?Then the DHS’ own page. It would seem that there is currently an “Acting Inspector General”
Here and hereThey don’t take the Office of the Inspector General for the DHS too seriously, it seems.
Ervin continues:
“Open Target”is the first insider’s account of the Department of Homeland Security and why it’s been such a failure to date. The book is to be released in the next couple of weeks, and I hope that it will have the effect of spurring the department, the Administration generally, and the Congress, into taking the steps that need to be taken to protect ourselves to the extent that we can do so. Terrorists are absolutely determined to strike us again, and, from everything we know, they are working urgently to exploit the gaps that remain in our defenses.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I posted another entry directly related to this:
The essence is that the role of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security was marginalized. And may very well have been a major contributor to the total breakdown in assessment and response.
A marginalized Inspector General:
* Meaning that audits on performance and preparedness were neglected.
* Meaning that policies and procedures were not properly tested and revised, as appropriate.
* Meaning that there was no proper system to provide feed-back on systemic shortcomings to those in charge.
* Meaning that most of the DHS/FEMA leadership – unmerited, corrupted, political appointees – were utterly unprepared and paralyzed when disaster struck.
ABC – Brian Ross reports: At issue, security failures at the Department of Homeland Security and allegations by a former Inspector General that the Bush administration wanted them covered up.
But former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is calling into question the recollection of his one-time Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin.
Ervin told ABC News that Ridge told him to tone down criticism of security failures in the months before the 2004 Presidential election.
In a statement to ABC News, Ridge says, “Mr. Ervin’s recall of events is wrong.”
I am sorry to be harping on regarding this topic, but here it is – a smoking gun for a completely corrupt system. Cronies and incompetence are installed, internal oversight is removed or sabotaged. Performance drops, funds are diverted through corrupt practices, the system totally disintegrates.
With this result:
WASHINGTON – The Federal Emergency Management Agency should be dissolved and rebuilt before the upcoming hurricane season, a Democratic senator said Sunday.
“FEMA has become, to many people in America, and particularly the Gulf Coast, a joke, a four-letter word,” said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
It seems to be deliberate and systematic. Are other departments as rotten and corrupt?
We need to inventory the reports of lacking internal oversight (and external oversight, for that matter). This may sound like an unbelievably boring topic, but believe me, the rot starts very quickly in any organization where it is lacking.
And the lack thereof enables the huge machinery of corrupt transfers from those in need of support and protection to those already rich beyond common measure.
don’t forget the fact that DHS was forcing its employees to sign secrecy pledges to cover up security laspes AT DHS HEADQUARTERS!!!!
There is so much crime and corruption that we can’t even keep track of it all.
Just unbelieveable….
great diary
Thanks for the reminder. I had actually read (and recommended) your green version of the entry.
I liked your concluding paragraph:
If this were any other administration I would assume that this man’s book would get some attention and things would change. But the library shelves are sagging with books written by former administration members telling us things are bad.
Yes it’s deliberate and systematic. Yes other departments are as rotten and corrupt — even if no books have been written about them, we know it’s true. I’m not even shocked anymore. And I don’t have a clue how to change things.
But you’re right, we need to know these things and give them our attention.
BTW — How did this man make it through life with the name Clark Kent? It makes me want to rip open his shirt and see if he has a big “S” on his underwear.
.
BLITZER: Let me read from “Open Target,” your new book. This passage –
“Our resolve to defeat the terrorist threat here at home does not match the terrorists’ resolve to defeat us here at home. This is what makes the vulnerability gap so wide in the terrorists’ favor. As long as this imbalance remains, each man, woman and child in the United States will be in mortal danger.”
The bottom line, you think they’re more committed to killing us than we are to stopping them.
ERVIN: Let me give you an example. Just last week, Secretary Chertoff announced a plan to begin vetting the names port workers against terrorist watch lists. That’s great, but why are we now, three years after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, nearly five years after 9/11, just getting around to doing that?
Conversely, bin Laden just last week announced again, reiterated his intention to attack the homeland. So the vulnerabilities that I lay out in this book are well known to the terrorists. They are working overtime to exploit them. Our leaders are not working overtime to close those security gaps.
BLITZER: On almost every page something startling pops up. On page 10, you write this, “Time and again, to my growing disillusionment and dismay, I found that our leaders were not taking the threat of terrorism seriously. I found that the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security seemed to care more about protecting their reputations than protecting the country.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
When you have an administration made up of people who hate the federal government and don’t believe that a well-run, effective, and efficient government is possible, they aren’t very likely to operate in ways that would lead to their being proved wrong.
I saw a news headling — I think it was the Washington Post — on my way past the newstand. Something about how utterly devastating a flu pandemic would be for this country, because the burdon of dealing with it would fall on local government/healthcare resourses that would be quickly overwhelmed.
And my first thought was, That’s because there would be no reliable, organized, methodical, competant assistance from the federal goverment… just like there wasn’t after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.
That needn’t be the case — but unless we have a new Administration, and seriously clean house at the major federal agencies (not to mention do some serious budget re-arrangement and rescind some high-end tax cuts)… The burden of responding to ANY big disaster or catastrophe, from another killer hurricane to another terrorist attack to a flood to a flu pandemic is going to fall primarily on local resources to deal with, for the very reasons that the response to Hurricane Katrina faltered so badly, and for the reasons stated in the diary above.
The federal agencies, which in the past have been actually quite good at responding to the kinds of things they were originally created to respond to, have been systematically undermined and crippled from within. US Government studies and statistics used to be fairly reliable as baseline resources, used by private industry and other governments all over the world. FEMA actually did a pretty good job not only of post-disaster recovery, but preparation and planning for disasters as well.
But over the past twenty or thirty years, a lot of what the government used to do in-house (ie, work on government-funded and sponsored projects and research was done by government employees in government labs) has been outsourced to private contractors — which cut the size of the federal workforce but didn’t actually seem to cut the government budget, and certainly did not increase efficiency or quality, though it did wonders for the private contractors’ bottom lines. Now what most federal government employees seem to do is manage outside contractors… who are naturally motivated to get and keep lucrative government contracts, but not necessarily in the best long-term interest of the country or the people. (prisons, for example, are more profitable than preventing crime or dealing with the underlying social problems that often lead to higher crime rates) And goodness knows, the military-industrial techno-gadget machine is far, FAR more profitable than actively seeking to reduce nuclear or conventional armaments of any kind…
Now you literally have foxes guarding the henhouse at any number of government agencies, particularly those having to do with regulating or watchdogging private industry.
There are a lot of very good, hard-working, experienced adn dedicated people in federal government agencies, from FEMA to NSA and the CIA to EPA to GSA to OSHA, and in DHS and certainly in the military. But like Mr. Ervin, their efforts to keep things on track or do their jobs are often marginalized or even punished — when those efforts appear to cast the present Administration or its hand-picked flunkies in a bad light. The whole system of checks and balances, internal audits, and program review is being ignored or simply not done at all.
And those results do in fact trickle down… to the detriment of anyone who finds themselves relying on the government for anything… from hurricane rescue to retirement social security checks to medicare/medicaid to trusting that the water from the local reservoir really is, in fact, safe to drink or the mine is safe to work in…..
A sure sign that people are clear that they don’t want it on their resume.