Let’s put this another way, the war on terrorism is going so badly in the US, simply because there aren’t any terrorist, that all the law agencies set up to fight them have to now turn their attention to law abiding citizens! That was always the plan, but they had to scare the population into supporting the establishment of so many law agencies, perhaps the highest per capita in the world. Now, the chickens have come home to roost.
Fusion centers are collaborative law enforcement and intelligence organizations that were established all over the country after 9/11 to share intelligence and counterterrorism information. But in the absence of a widespread domestic terrorist threat, they have not consistently demonstrated their value, according to a recent study.
“Fusion centers emerged almost spontaneously in response to a need by state and local law enforcement for useful and usable intelligence related to the evolving terrorist threat,” observed Milton Nenneman, a Sacramento police officer, in a master’s thesis (pdf) based on a survey of California fusion centers.
But the terrorist threat has turned out to be “insufficient” to justify or sustain the new fusion centers.
“There is, more often than not, insufficient purely ‘terrorist’ activity to support a multi-jurisdictional and multi-governmental level fusion center that exclusively processes terrorist activity,” said Lt. Nenneman.
As a result, “Fusion centers must consider analyzing or processing other criminal activity, in addition to terrorist activity, in order to maintain the skills and interest of the analysts, as well as the participation and data collection of the emergency responder community.”
Agencies with budgets approaching independent countries are now turning their attention on “criminal activity”, whatever that means, to keep the mental acumen of their analyst employees sharp. What will agencies established to fight terrorist whose employees are responders to terrorism do to remain proficient when there are no terrorists to fight? Is anyone interested in that question?
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