The brand-new Department of Homeland Security in America is publicly confessing what any intelligent observer could have told it as soon as it was formed. In these modern days when customers want goodies from everywhere, it is completely impossible to prevent hard drugs, weapons, explosives and even nuclear weapons from being imported into a country. We must also bear in mind that a considerable part of the world's economy -- namely, trading in hard drugs and illegal immigrants -- is already in the hands of criminal experts with networks that governments find impossible to penetrate, except on the fringes occasionally.
The symbolic end to the highly-centralised militarised nation-state occurred on 6 August 1945 when the nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. A further intimation occurred when Saudi Arabian terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 and when, it now appears, the White House was also intended to be attacked.
Millions of freight containers move backwards and forwards between all nation-states and it is only a matter of time before something dreadful is imported into one country or another and a centralised government and its leaders are taken out of existence. Besides, these days, a nuclear bomb could be imported in a briefcase or a backpack and not necessarily pass through a customs post -- as a million Mexicans a year are now doing across the Texas border and more than that are entering Western Europe from Africa and Asia.
There is, of course, no reason why a modern government should not become decentralised and operate from dispersed offices, perhaps even underground -- just as was planned in many countries in the 60s and 70s, including this one, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And, of course, such underground offices could maintain contact with one another and with its military by means of Internet-type communications. No technical problem at all.
But kings, military leaders and politicians would no longer be able to do what they've always been able to do -- manipulate the public's emotions by appearing before them in person or, in recent decades, via the media. (In the last election campaign Tony Blair hardly ever appeared in front of ordinary people because he was frightened of being questioned about the invasion of Iraq and the increasing breakdown of the state education and health systems. He fleed from journalists by helicopter from one constituency to another all through the campaign and appeared only in front of invited audiences of loyal supporters. The media were then allowed to take photos and film him -- not that more than a minority bother to watch political programmes on TV these days.)
We will always need some form of governance (I imagine) to keep civil order and to offer safety nets to unfortunates, but it is going to be totally different from the massive centralised directorates and manipulates of today. All forms of governance of the past -- city-states, empires and so on -- came to an end when a brand new weapon was invented that could overcome them, and a new form of defensible governance had to evolve. The same will now start to happen to the centralised nation-state over the coming century or so because it is now defenceless. Like Tony Blair before him, President Bush is probably going to be the last leader of America who will appear in public in future years.
Keith Hudson
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US EFFORT TO SECURE FOREIGN PORTS IS FAULTED
Eric Lipton
Washington -- The Department of Homeland Security's effort to extend its antiterrorism campaign overseas by enlisting help from importers and foreign ports has been so flawed that the program may have made it easier at times to smuggle unconventional weapons into the United States, Congressional officials say.
Homeland Security has reduced inspections in the United States of cargo coming from 36 foreign ports and 5,000 importers that were certified under its antiterrorism initiatives. But the department has failed to confirm whether most of those importers have tightened security or whether thousands of high-risk containers headed to the United States were inspected at ports overseas, agency records show.
"We have folks here who have the right intentions," said Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota, chairman of an investigative panel scheduled to hold an oversight hearing on the programs on Thursday. "But rather than making it harder for folks with evil intentions to do harm to this country, we have in place a system that creates the potential for greater vulnerability."
The port and importer programs, which offer incentives to those who sign on to Homeland Security initiatives, are intended to help block threats overseas so they cannot reach American shores, government officials say. But Kristi M. Clemens, assistant commissioner at Customs and Border Protection -- the division of Homeland Security that set up these efforts -- said the agency realized that the two programs had some problems.
"We have had to make adjustments to further strengthen the program," she said in an interview on Tuesday. "The criticisms are fine, some of them have been helpful."
However, Ms. Clemens rejected the suggestion that the programs' weaknesses had compromised national security. "We are still in a better position with the programs than we were without it," she said. "We are on the right track. Are we perfect? No." Customs officials have long recognized that the nine million ship containers arriving in the United States each year pose a security risk. Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, called the containers "the potential Trojan horse of the 21st century" in a speech in January.
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New York Times -- 25 May 2005
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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