Osama’s killing noteworthy

Opinion: May 9, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By James Jay Carafano

Heritage Foundation

It’s been called the Rodney Dangerfield branch of government. But after “getting” Osama bin Laden, the Department of Homeland Security deserves a little respect.

Yes, it seems as if everyone has a “you’re not going to believe this” story about navigating TSA’s airport checkpoints. The border seems as porous as ever; people roll their eyes when you mention immigration. Yet the success of the bin Laden mission shows that the Department of Homeland Security has become an important force in combating terrorism. Before 9/11, every aspect of homeland security that the department does today was done by some federal agency. That contributed to the problem.

Washington looked like a Rube Goldberg contraption, with almost every office doing some little piece of the job, at times clueless and indifferent to what others were up to.

In fact, part of the reason we didn’t prevent 9/11 was because we were so unprepared, not because bin Laden was such a terrorist mastermind.

After all, the last time Washington had seriously “rethought” how to deal with security at home was 1941, when the FBI received the authority to lead domestic “national security” investigations.

Homeland Security

As the 9/11 Commission pointed out in the aftermath of the attacks, government had not kept up with the threat. Enter Homeland Security. Job one in the wake of 9/11 was herding all the cats into one department. Job two was organizing them. Little observed is how much progress has been made in the second task. The Department of Homeland Security provided critical information that helped nail David Headley, an American who undertook missions for foreign terrorists. He pleaded guilty for his role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks and was charged with planning an assassination in Denmark of the Mohammed cartoonist. Information that led to his capture and prosecution came from Homeland Security.

Najibullah Zazi pled guilty to plotting to bomb the New York subways — attacks that were stopped only hours or days before they were set to go off. Homeland Security provided information that proved Zazi belonged to a terrorist network and was a threat that should be taken seriously. The department was right. And it was Homeland Security, not the FBI, that apprehended the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before he fled the country.

There’s more. There have been at least 38 terrorists plots aimed at the United States since 9/11. Homeland Security played a role in thwarting, investigating or apprehending suspects in many of these cases. Every day, the department combats “terrorist travel” — preventing bad people from getting on planes to come to the United States, or turning back suspicious characters at points of entry such as airports, sea ports and land crossings from Canada and the United States.

Behind the scenes

Much of the most important work occurs out of sight of everyday Americans. And, most importantly, it gets done without ripping up the Constitution and treating our individual liberties like a speed bump in the race to find terrorists.

While many “advocates” cry like Chicken Little about the loss of freedom from the War on Terror, their criticisms lack both proportionality and credibility. During the Civil War, and World Wars I and II, government did illegally impinge on civil liberties, and on a large scale. But not in this one. Homeland Security’s sins are not attacks on liberty. Mostly they are attacks on common sense. A good example is the recently (and rightly scrapped) color-coded alert system, which did little but provide fodder for late-night comedians.

Frustration with dumb security measures is understandable. But we shouldn’t forget the solid counterterrorism work that helped keep bin Laden and his plots at bay — until the SEALs could put a well-deserved end to his career in terror.

James Jay Carafano is director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.