From Pine View Farm

The Enemy Within 2

Speaking of Pigg River, to quote Pogo. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Foreign Policy in Focus reports:

But the greatest dangers for the United States do not lurk in terrorist cells in the mountains surrounding Kandahar that are planning on assaults on American targets. Rather, our vulnerabilities are homegrown. The United States plays host to thousands of nuclear weapons, toxic chemical dumps, radioactive waste storage facilities, complex pipelines and refineries, offshore oil rigs, and many other potentially dangerous facilities that require constant maintenance and highly trained and motivated experts to keep them running safely.

The United States currently lacks safety protocols and effective inspection regimes for the dangerous materials it has amassed over the last 60 years. We don’t have enough inspectors and regulators to engage in the work of assessing the safety and security of ports, bridges, pipelines, power plants, and railways. The rapid decline in the financial, educational, and institutional infrastructure of the United States represents the greatest threat to the safety of Americans today.

And it’s getting worse.

More at the link.

Via Asia Times.

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2 comments

  1. George Smith

    April 11, 2014 at 6:34 pm

    This is the lede graf? ORLY? Wow, nobody’s noticed that!
    “The U.S. security complex is up in arms about cyberhackers and foreign terrorists targeting America’s vulnerable infrastructure. Think tank reports have highlighted the chinks in homeland security represented by unsecured ports, dams, and power plants. We’ve been bombarded by stories about outdated software that is subject to hacking and the vulnerability of our communities to bioterrorism. Reports such as the Heritage Foundation’s “Microbes and Mass Casualties: Defending America Against Bioterrorism” describe a United States that could be brought to its knees by its adversaries unless significant investments are made in ‘hardening’ these targets.”
    The Nation and company can suck a big one. I wrote about this subject, systematically and for almost every day, for at least the last ten years. They never cared in the slightest. Bo-o-0-r-ing.
    Now I have news for them. It’s too late. They have no idea. The damage is done, the DHS and national security megaplex is carved in heavier stone than the Rockies. There’s no undoing it.
    What’s especially irritating, and I’ve written this before, too, is that all the media outlets that used to write about this stuff surrendered and rolled over on the subject a decade ago. They went supine on the entire matter. 
    The idea that now, now, they’re mentioning some title of a bioterror report from the quack Heritage Foundation is absurd. Perhaps they missed the years when all that was in the respectable news was how catastrophic bioterrorism was easy, or that the scientist who pushed it the most with rigged tests wound up as the director of research and giver at monies at the Department of Homeland Security. Or that the only bioterrorists, one big one and one teeny lab on opposite sides of the country, were our people. The Heritage Foundation — it’s to laugh. 
     

     
  2. Frank

    April 11, 2014 at 10:54 pm

    As Johnny Carson used to say, I don’t write ’em, I just read ’em.

    I thought the larger point was worth noting.