Amen, Brother Hunter

From occasional front-page Daily Kos diarist Hunter:

Although we do not yet know the scope or details of today's announced counterterrorism bust, it's generally worth noting that the British are a hell of a lot more competent in wrapping potential terrorism up than we seem to be, and that the British have accomplished this via normal law enforcement techniques coupled with apparently excellent human and signals intelligence. It's also worth noting that at present, foreign involvement with the plot seems at this early stage to be primarily Pakistani in origin -- one of those countries that has unambiguous ties to terrorism, as opposed to oh, say... Iraq.

[...]

The rather less serious and competent U.S. response, on the other hand, seems to be to reduced to making sure that from now on, nobody can take bottled water onto airplanes.

In the U.S., we have spent the last five years deciding the rule of law is insufficient; we engage in kidnappings and illegal renditions; we promote and practice torture; we invent a color-coded system of enforced national panic; we declare that presidential authority has no boundaries in wartime, or in anything that any administration figure might construe as being wartime; we engage in an overscoped, unprecedentedly broad explosion of espionage against American citizens that has created the world's largest and least successful haystack; we entered into a preemptive war with a country that had no meaningful ties whatsoever to the actual war on terrorism. (OK, the British definitely did that last one too.)

At the same time, our human intelligence efforts are nearly nil, port security continues to be ignored, our military services are tossing out fluent Arabic translators for the transgression of being gay, and the funding of meaningful "homeland security" efforts is being treated like it was a carnival game by the Republican congress, which cannot fundamentally distinguish between security efforts and required "pork" patronage.

I don't feel safer, today.