“It’s just madness that (the Homeland Security Department) cut New York City’s funding by 40 percent,” boomed Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, according to a follow-up published in the New York Daily News in the wake of Ron Suskind’s Time magazine article. “If Zawahiri did squash the gas attack because it wouldn’t be deadly enough, that boosts the argument that federal authorities should not be spreading security dollars around the country in places such as Louisville, Ky., and Omaha, Neb., which saw major hikes in funding. Only in places such as New York and Washington can terrorists hope to raise the ante from Sept. 11, King said,” never mind that the “terrorists” responsible for the original nine eleven attacks were never sufficiently identified or brought to justice, or were those responsible for the anthrax attacks, serving effectively as a scary Freddy Kruger promotional event designed to rush the Orwellian Patriot Act through a cowed Congress.

“The boundaries between business and government had been effectively erased in 2002, when Bush created the Department of Homeland Security,” write Eric Klinenberg and Thomas Frank for Rolling Stone. “Although the administration initially opposed the idea of an umbrella agency to oversee domestic security after 9/11, it wound up staging a political coup by approving DHS on the condition that it be conducted as a massive merger-and-acquisition deal. In what amounted to a hostile takeover, the self-proclaimed ‘MBA president’ stuffed twenty-two federal agencies and more than 183,000 government employees into a single, gigantic department committed to shifting as much work as possible from the public to the private sector.”

Bush appointed inexperienced friends to top posts, outsourced essential government services to the party’s corporate backers and gave anti-terrorism programs priority over everything else, including disaster preparedness. Homeland Security became the only federal agency ever designed to hollow out government and enrich an administration’s corporate cronies. “It was a brilliant tactic,” says Don Kettl, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. “The Bush administration used DHS to seize power.”

According to the Homeland Security Research Corporation, a private firm that monitors the “market” in federal contracts, government outsourcing on homeland security has soared by $130 billion since Bush took office. And that’s just a fraction of the windfall expected in the next five years. By 2010, the firm predicts, “the tragic events that resulted from Hurricane Katrina”—combined with the administration’s “much greater reliance on the private sector”—will boost the global market in homeland security by another $400 billion.

“Since fiscal 2001, annual spending on contracts managed by the Homeland Security Department or its precursor agencies has more than doubled, to $5.8 billion, according to data from Eagle Eye Publishers Inc., a company that analyzes government contracting data,” the Washington Post reported last May. “The beneficiaries include Unisys Corp., Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp., General Dynamics Corp. and Accenture Ltd., along with such lesser-known companies as Veritas Capital Inc. and Datatrac Information Services Inc.,” corporations contracted to protect us from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama’s Boy Friday, who may or may not be in Tehran’s Evin jail, where political prisoners are usually held, according to the Hayat-e-Nou newspaper.

Ayman al-Zawahiri is the founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terror group spawned by the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter organization long ago selected by the CIA and British intelligence to serve as the Billy Graham of the Islamic world, according to Said Aburish. “Strangely enough, according to an expert who testified before a U.S. Congressional committee in January 2000, al-Zawahiri was granted U.S. residence by the Immigration and Naturalization Service—something almost impossible for many legitimate immigrants to obtain,” Umberto Pascali claims.

But never mind. It’s really not important al-Zawahiri is an intelligence asset. It’s not important the entire “war on terror,” now rechristened the “Long War” (engineered for decades and decades of long-term profit for the above mentioned corporations and others) is a transparent scam. It doesn’t matter because millions of people still read Time magazine and tune in Fox News and believe the nonsense they read and hear there. It doesn’t matter that the corporate media, acting as a modern version of the hypnotist Svengali, has mesmerized the public at large with scary campfire stories of evil terrorists in turbans, toting Kalashnikovs and canisters of cyanide, and the threat is blown absurdly out of all proportion, now reaching the very apex of cartoonish inanity.

As Rep. Pete King eluded, the al-Zawahiri rain check is little more than a turf war over Ministry of Homeland Security spoils. Naturally, all of this should be obvious to those of us accustomed to reading between the lines, an art form honed to a sharp point over the last few years. Destruction of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was parceled out to greedy corporations some time ago and the incipient police state now under construction is a wholly privatized and contractual affair.

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