another segment:
"At any rate, operating under that apparently unanimous mentality, US intelligence extravagantly imagined that the number of trained al-Qaeda operatives in the United States was between 2,000 and 5,000.
Over the years, such thinking has been internalized and institutionalized in a great many ways, and it has proved to be notably resistant to counter-information. Indeed, officials often seem to live in what might be called “I think, therefore they are” denial.
Thus, on February 11,2003, a year and a half after 9/11, FBI Director Robert Mueller assured the Senate Intelligence Committee that “the greatest threat is from al-Qaeda cells in the US that we have not identified.” He somehow judged the threat from those unidentified entities to be “increasing” and claimed to know that “al-Qaeda maintains the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the US with little warning.” On February 16,2005, he testified before the same committee that he remained “very concerned about what we are not seeing,” a sentence rendered in bold lettering in his prepared text.
By that time, however, an FBI report had concluded that, despite years of well-funded sleuthing, it had yet to uncover a single true al-Qaida sleeper cell in the United States.
Since the number of al-Qaeda operatives actually in the country came out to be zero or nearly so, and since the threat of terrorism in the country proved to be far more limited than initially feared—not even one of the “dozens and dozens” of attacks like 9/11 ever materialized of course—there might logically have been some judicious cutbacks to the funds devoted to dealing with the issue in subsequent years. Far overdue, clearly, are extensive and transparently-presented studies seeking rationally to evaluate the massive increases in homeland security
expenditures that have taken place since 9/11 —increases that total well over $1 trillion. But virtually none of this has been done by the administrators in charge.
Instead, initial, if clearly alarmist, perspectives have been essentially maintained and the vast and hasty increases in spending on homeland security continue to be perpetuated. Important in this have been increases in intelligence and policing as the questing enterprise, central to which is the NSA, continues to be expanded, searching for the needle by adding more and more hay."
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