If Liz were Queen

AND PERHAPS THE ENEMY INCLUDES PEOPLE LIKE U.S. CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVE SAM JOHNSON’S SON WHO RUN A FUSION CENTER IN COLLIN COUNTY TEXAS WHO WANT TO “PROTECT” US FROM THOSE WHO DISAGREE WITH THEIR VIEWPOINTS.

Please note Texans:  Sam Johnson’s son doesn’t even live in Texas!  His permanent residence is in the even more posh area of Santa Fe New Mexico.

************************************************************

Running as a candidate for the U.S. Third Congressional district in Texas continues to be a path of ever widening and deepening education for me.  I know a lot and because I know a lot, I also realize that there are many gaps in my education.  However, another plus about me as a candidate is that I am, like any ordinary American, educable and open to continued enlightenment.

Until this morning, I had no idea as to what a “fusion center” is.  Honestly, I cannot recall ever having heard the term, much less that there is one in the Third Congressional District of Texas, much less that is run by Sam Johnson’s son and his wife, much less that they have received over a million dollars from the American taxpayers, much less that these people don’t even live in the state of Texas.

***************************************************

North Texas Central Fusion System is a two person company.

The manager of the center is listed as Anita Miller. Ms. Miller is the wife of Dr. Bob Johnson (Bob Johnson is the son of Sam Johnson, 80 year old U.S. Representative for 20 years from the 3rd US Congressional District where the center is located.. Together, Miller and Johnson are ADB, a two person company that has been paid over one million dollars to build and operate the NCTFS)

Entrusting the management of this critical multi-million dollar operation to a husband and wife team who live 600 miles away should raise questions about managerial probity at NCTFS.

In April of 2009, a sub-committee of the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee held a public hearing titled, “The Future of Fusion Centers: Potential Promise and Dangers”.

The dominant topics of the hearing were Collin County’s own North Central Texas Fusion System (NCTFS), and an op-ed written by libertarian Bruce Fein and published in the Washington Times.

*********************************************************

Fusion centers dampen and cast a cloud over free speech and association. Their intelligence collection efforts insinuate that political dissent is unpatriotic or dangerous and threaten to make dissenters targets for law enforcement or candidates for terrorism watch lists. The greatest threat to liberty is an inert people, which is what fusion centers induce by placing a price on the exercise of fundamental democratic freedoms.

A Fusion Center is a terrorism prevention and response center that was started as a joint project between the Department of Homeland Security an the US Department of Justice  Office of Justice Programs between 2003 and 2007.  ANOTHER ABUSE OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS AND OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS FROM GEORGE AND DICK.

The fusion centers gather information not only from government sources, but also from their partners in the private sector.

They are designed to promote information sharing at the federal level between agencies such as the CIA, FBI, US Military and Department of Justice as well as state and local level government. As of July 2009, the Department of Homeland Security  recognized at least seventy-two fusion centers ^.   Fusion centers may also be affiliated with an Emergency Operations Center that responds in the event of a disaster.^[update]

State and local police departments (along with our tax dollars) provide both space and resources for the majority of fusion centers. The analysts working there can be drawn from DHS, local police, or the private sector. A number of fusion centers operate tip hotlines and also invite relevant information from public employees, such as sanitation workers or firefighters.

Hey Texans, how do you like the idea of your tax dollar paying a million plus dollars to support a posh lifestyle in Santa Fe New Mexico for the son of your elected official?

***********************************************************************

Core First Amendment principles will never be honored by law enforcement officers or public officials. Their psychological preoccupations are order and the status quo; they viscerally fear or are perturbed by the prospect of change or challenges to the existing power structure.

Further, they are rewarded financially and professionally by the volume of intelligence collected. There are no serious quality controls because few if any are fit to separate the terrorist wheat from the innocuous chaff. There are no reliable earmarks of a would‐be terrorist. Some are rich. Some are poor. Some are devout. Some are religiously indifferent. Some are educated. Some are without schooling.

Timothy McVeigh was not a prime suspect in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. Arab Muslims were.

******************************************************

Fusion Centers are worthless bureaucratic pieces of nonsense that were created by the Bush/Cheney regime as a tool to wield against those whose political viewpoints differed from theirs.  And in the offing, as we can see they also can be used to reward the faithful and indeed, as in Sam Johnson’s case, even the children of the faithful.

***********************************************************

As Bruce Fein, a libertarian, pointed out in last April in his statement before the subcommittee on intelligence sharing and terrorism risk assessment committee on Homeland Security regarding the Future of Fusion Centers: 

The Soviet Union had its KGB, East Germany had its Stasi, and the United States should profit by those examples. It should abandon fusion centers that engage 800,000 state and local law enforcement officers in the business of gathering and sharing allegedly domestic or international terrorism intelligence. The vast majority conceive this task as synonymous with monitoring and disparaging political dissent and association protected by the First Amendment.

We do not need to speculate about fusion center mischief perpetrated by the North Central Texas Fusion System that is run by the son of Sam Johnson, US Congressional Representative.  On February 19, 2009, the North Central Texas Fusion System issued a “prevention Awareness Bulletin” that might easily have been penned by recruits from East Germany’s Stasi.  As Mr. Fein points out, the fusion center viewed with alarm constitutionally protected speech an activity which are the backbone of democracy an prevent the ideological landscape from turning into a petrified forest.