Recently by Becky Akers: Liquid, Liquid Everywhere, But Not a Drop To Drink Free of Our Rulers' Stranglehold

Remember fusion centers? Under the Department of Homeland Securitys aegis, their bumbling bureaucrats unabashedly spy on taxpayers while painting anyone who opposes Leviathan in even the smallest degree as a terrorist. Or, as the DHS puts it, State and major urban area fusion centers (fusion centers) serve as focal points within the state and local environment for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between the federal government and state, local, tribal, territorial … and private sector partners.

Yep, fusion centers are yet another boondoggle that enriches Our Rulers and their corporate cronies while decimating liberty. No one who understands the State expected otherwise. But now Congressional investigators have caught on: theyve announced that fusion centers have failed to provide virtually any useful intelligence. The report found that the centers forwarded intelligence of uneven quality  oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism. Oh, heavens, say it aint so.

Surprise, surprise: money went missing, too. The investigators also discovered that federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers and that some of the centers listed on paper by the Homeland Security Department do not even exist. The fusion centers quickly became a black hole for taxpayer money . The fusion centers were run by state and local officials, but were funded through grants to states from the Federal Emergency Management Agency with little oversight. That made it easy for state and local officials to divert the federal money earmarked for the centers to other things, including sport utility vehicles and dozens of flat-screen televisions for use by state and local agencies.

Prepare for another shock: Our Rulers lied about these crimes. Top officials of the Homeland Security Department have known about the problems for years, but hid an internal department report on the programs flaws from Congress while continuing to tell lawmakers and the public that the fusion centers were highly valuable . A 2010 internal assessment by the department discovered, for instance, that four of its claimed 72 fusion centers did not exist, even as department officials kept using the 72 figure publicly with Congress.

Ah, but fusion centers do have their uses, chief among them those lucrative corporate contracts and tightening our shackles. So while Congressional investigators have exploded counterterrorism as the raison detre for these Orwellian, completely unconstitutional monsters, look for them to flourish and prosper. No heads at DHS will roll; no congresscriminals will propose reining in this horrific bureaucracy, let alone abolishing it; those wimps wont even mind that the agency lied to them and repeatedly played them for fools. Fusion centers are not only intrinsic but invaluable to the police-state.

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