I’ve always hated the way we responded to 9/11. It’s a bunch of nonsense and, like searching student lockers in high school, conditions us all to be sheep in order to “stay safe.” This is DUHbya and BushCo’s enduring legacy, along with two wars that have killed many times more than 9/11 did. Idiots.

Fahreed Zakaria: Why America Overreacted to 9/11 – Newsweek 9/4/10

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.

Zakaria: Why America Overreacted to 9/11 – Newsweek

See mjh’s blog — There is no end to our misdirection

Ted Koppel: Nine years after 9/11, let’s stop playing into bin Laden’s hands

By Ted Koppel

Sunday, September 12, 2010