Homeland
Security: The Sworn Duty of Public Officials
The
United States has a unique position amongst
the countries of the world; it has a history of individual rights,
legal process, economic success, and cultural inclusion that few
other countries can meet. This view of America's place in the world
is often called “exceptionalism”. This
view, and the listed attributes that contribute towards it, flies in
the face of most human governing philosophies which are statist or
tribal ( or both) in nature. The concept of America is thus hated by
many, who then seek to harm the way of life in the United States, and
to harm the Americans who benefit from it. The sworn duty of public
official in America is to protect Americans
from these threats. Horwitz argues that the Constitution is a
"meta-rule of construction" dedicated to "national
self-preservation", he stresses the importance of the
Presidential Oath as dedicated to preserve, protect, and defend the
Constitution (2009, pp. 1069-1070). We can see that the oath of
every public official derives from the principle of "national
self-preservation" based upon the Constitution. These duties
include understanding the threats to the United States, developing
the proper measures to counter those threats, and ensuring that those
measures are effectively pursued. The purpose of this paper is to
explore that relationship.
Understanding
the threats posed to America requires understanding both the
organized threats, and the threats that occur due to normal
circumstances. The three major threats
which have faced Americans have been racism, statism in the form of
socialism and Islam, and mala in se crime. Racism is a philosophical
threat due to it's primary opposition to individual rights and the
legal process, but becomes an actual threat when racists use violence
to prevent Americans from using their rights. Socialism, also known
as leftism, is statist by nature, and threatens the American way of
life in all four areas ( individual rights, legal process, economic
success, and cultural inclusion. Islam is a religion and political
system in one package, sharia, which denies the principle of
individual rights. Mala in se crime steals both life and economic
success from Americans.
There
are other threats, those that arise out of normal circumstances, that
play into the way that America can respond to the major threats.
Growth complex hurts our ability to defend ourselves when bureaucrats
are more concerned with budgets than with achieving their
primary mission. Corruption within the system, whether through
ideology or through bribery, subverts the ability
to defend the nation. Complacency,
corruption and growth complex all contribute towards an environment
in which “the oath can all too easily become 'a meaningless and
perfunctory recitation' rather than an acknowledgment of the high
level of responsibility that it is meant to imbue in its takers”
(Hundley & Wamsley, 2012, p.644). Economic threats pose a mostly
unrecognized danger to America, Nando argues that "National
security depends also on soft power, the ability of a country to
generate and use its economic power and to project its national
values" (2011, summary).
The
Ku Klux Klan and The New Black Panther Party are the most recent
forms of organized racist violence in the United
States. The Klan has gone through several iterations of
organization. Similar to the Klan are Christian identity groups such
as the Army of God, and anti-government militias, such as those the
FBI took action against in 1996; the Freemen Organization, The
Mountaineer Militia, and the Washington State Militia (Federal Bureau
of Investigation, 1996, pp.7-8).Socialist violence has been limited
to “animal rights” and “ecological groups” for the most part
since the mid 1980's. Such groups include the Animal Liberation Front
(ALF), the Earth liberation Front (ELF), and Revenge of the Trees
(ROTT); these groups committed all terror attacks within the United
States in the year 2000 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2001, p.2)
but the “Occupy Wall Street” movement has brought leftist
violence back to Americas streets. Leftists have used less violence
as they have subverted influential American institutions such as
academia, the media, and the bureaucracy.
George notes that “A surprising number of college and university
professors...were active in... radical movements...Many critiques of
the trend towards authoritarianism on some campuses...charge that
these former radicals have played a major part in it's development”
(1996, p. 144). Islamist groups include
lone wolves. Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, who also use crime in
America to fund their terror activities. Criminal groups include
nacroterror cartels, organized crime syndicates, and street gangs
There
was a “wall” preventing information sharing prior to 9/11.
Intelligence services committed many excess in the 1970''s which led
to restrictions on their operations; Collier and Horowitz explain
that they were ”barred from surveillance of all political groups,
even those whose agenda indicated intentions to engage in illegal and
violent acts” (2006, p. 217). Powers asserts that this atmosphere
led to an environment in which FBI agents were described
as “risk-averse, politically correct, an excess of caution,
timorous” (2004, p. 47). Although the PATRIOT Act provided for
information sharing access, there are still areas in which full
information sharing is prevented. Information sharing is vital to
homeland security as the GAO acknowledges, “Information procedures
should provide incentives for sharing, to restore a better balance
between security and shared knowledge” (United States General
Accountability Office, 2004, p. 33).
Border
issues are also an area of security concern. The threat on the
largest scale is the economic damage caused
by illegal immigration; unemployment of citizens, a lowered wage
scale, welfare expenditure not only to citizens cut out of work by
illegal immigration but often to those that are here criminally, and
by remittances of wages to the homelands of the aliens. As Nardo
previously discussed, such economic damage
also hurts homeland security. However,
there are threats from organized groups as well; the narcoterrorist
cartels and the gangs they ally with The DPS report makes the point
that “Gangs working with the Mexican cartels are involved in a
level of crime that affects the entire state”(DPS, 2013, p.20).
The DPS report also points out that DTO's have a history of
corrupting public officials in Mexico and that the DTO's “ also
seek to corrupt public officials in the US” (DPS, 2013, p.34).
Finally, there is the distinct possibility that terror groups
use the unprotected nature of our borders to sneak into the country,
a possibility Whitfield (2011) discusses at length.
The
United States has attempted to deal with these threats with several
mechanisms. The first was the creation of the Department
Homeland Security, the 2007 National Strategy for Homeland Security
specifies three primary goals, and a fourth goal of building a
foundation to support the first three. The three primary goals are
to prevent and disrupt terrorist attacks; to protect the American
people, our critical infrastructure, and key resources; and finally
to respond to and recover from incidents that do occur (2007, p.1).
The PATRIOT Act was passed, with a primary goal of bringing down
barriers to effective intelligence sharing.
These
initiative are not enough. America needs to take a preemptive
attitude towards dealing with those that have publicly declared we
are their enemies. In addition, we have not
acted fully upon the measures we have set as our goals. Specific
recommendations 9/11 commission were not
followed up on; The 9/11 Families for a Secure America Foundation in
conjunction with Family Security Matters (Gadiel
and Dunleavy, 2011) issued a report card on the implementation
of the 9/11 Commission's findings at the end of the ten year period
after the attack. This report card covered twenty-six of the
Commission's forty-one recommendations The
majority of these grades were in the “C” to “F” range.
(Durchin, 2015, p, 1).
To
make the issue worse, our local and Federal
agencies have not fully come together to pursue these goals in a
cooperative manner. Brig. Gen Wilson described the fusion centers he
has worked with as ineffective due to interorganizational conflict
(2015).
The
foremost thing that America's security professionals need to do is to
remember their oaths, and see to it that all public officials see to
their own oaths as well. Williams discusses the concept of
“Neglect in Duty” in English common law; a concept which applies
to any public officer in any polity; he quotes Stephen to the effect
that “Every public officer commits a misdemeanour who willfully
neglects to perform any duty which he is bound either by common law
or by statute to perform” (Williams, 2010, p. 336). And yet there
are myriad examples of public officials
failing to perform their sworn duties and failing to be held
accountable for their actions. Governor Nixon failed to deploy the
National Guard in riot conditions with the result that several
business were destroyed (Williams specifically mentions on page 338
a mayor who fails to prevent a riot as an example of “Neglect in
Duty”). In Operation Fast and Furious, BATF provided weapons to
violent narcoterror cartels in an operation that the OIG of the DOJ
found to have “lack of sufficient controls and inadequate
attention to public safety” (Department of Justice, 2012, p. 419),
and that resulted in the deaths of 3 American lawmen ( and hundreds
of Mexican nationals). AG Eric Holder then punished whistle
blowers and refused to provide evidence in the matter. The
Obama administration traded five known terrorists for one known
deserter; CNN discusses the suspicion that the released terrorists
may have started terror activity upon release (Starr, 2015, para
1-3). The Obama Administration can not even hold to legal standards
on border security; “President Obama’s lawyers admitted to a
federal judge late Thursday that they had broken the court’s
injunction halting the administration’s new deportation amnesty”
(Dinan, 2015, para. 1). There has been no repercussion for these
acts of nonfeasance and malfeasance, despite the pattern of their
incidence. Davidson and Stone explain that our legal system does not
rely on one single agency to punish such acts:
Although
the Constitution assigns some responsibilities exclusively to one or
another branch of government, in general our legal and political
system resists rigid institutional assignments. In evaluating where
to lodge responsibility for an inquiry, it is better to think of
guideposts rather than barriers or mandated sequences(2000, p. 33).
It
is up to the sworn officer on the line to ensure that the oaths of
all public officials are adhered to,
elected official or not. Although every jurisdiction has different
laws regarding nonfeasance, malfeasance, and misfeasance, in most
jurisdictions these are aresstable offenses. Security officials can
not be expected to uphold their own oaths
when politicians suborn those oaths without punishment.
References
A
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