WE FEEL SO SAFE KNOWING THESE GUYS ARE IN CHARGE – AT 8:57 A.M. ET:  One of our great, and realistic, nightmares is that nuclear materials can be smuggled into the U.S. across the Mexican border.  In fact, it's probably inevitable.

But not to worry.  Homeland Security is in charge.  Consider this, from Fox News:

The Department of Homeland Security has wasted up to nearly a half billion dollars in taxpayer money and time on its current plans to develop technology at the nation's borders to detect nuclear material being smuggled into the country, according to two recent GAO reports cited by a Republican senator on Thursday.

In one program, the Government Accountability Office concluded the technology was being pushed too hard too fast. In another case, the equipment was too big and it didn't fit into the cargo container inspection lanes.

“This is not a picture of good government at work,” said Gene Aloise, a senior investigator with the GAO who covers homeland security.

He added that the department had been warned repeatedly about the problems.

“It's not good government, it's not best practices and in some cases it wasn't even common sense.”

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, noted that the lack of basic communication smacked of dysfunction.

“The first thing that you'd think would be done, would be that the department would talk to the agency that's going to use the equipment to find out what would work,” Collins told Fox News on Capitol Hill. “In this case, millions of dollars was wasted because one office did not talk to another office about what was needed.”

COMMENT:  You would also think that, nine years after 9-11, we'd have systems, and even second-generation systems, in place.  What we lack in Washington is a sense of urgency, a sense that these threats can kill us.

Nuclear materials smuggled across our borders can lead to an attack with more casualties than we have suffered in all our wars put together. 

Heads should roll.  But heads are firmly attached in the Washington bureaucracy.  The sad fact is that this story will probably be forgotten in a few days because much of the mainstream media shies away from stories that suggest anything bad can come from south of the border. 

September 24, 2010