Accountability (2)
Revere over at Effect Measure has made point in the past that the relentless focus on homeland security, where homeland security is narrowly defined as threats by foreign terrorists, has put basic public health in the shadow. No disagreement here.
But when it comes to disaster preparation and response, you would think that it would be the pretty much the same whether we were talking about a hurricane, flooding, earthquake, “chemical terrorism” (for example, sabotage of the chlorine tanks at the local wastewater plant) or detonation of a radiation dispersal device (technical term for a "dirty bomb"). You obtain similar results with each of these hazards; a considerably-sized area is rendered uninhabitable, there are hundreds or thousands of casualties and tens or hundreds of thousands of people are displaced. The way you handle them should be fairly similar - mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery.
However, If this component of "homeland security" is so broken, what can the Bush Administration possibly do that would help us believe the rest of it works any better, and that homeland security in general wasn’t just money down the rathole?
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