Please pardon my haunting paranoia, but I believe the German people experienced something similar to the present creation of the enormous bureaucracy called "homeland security." The original organization was called the Security Service (Sicherheitsdiest), created in 1933 under the command of Reinhard Heydrich.
The Defense Corps (Schutzstaffel) in 1934 was combined with the Sicherheitsdiest, and in 1936 the Secret State Police (Geheime Staatpolizei, or Gestapo) came under the command of Reinhard Heydrich with Heinrich Muller as the chief of operations.
So, the apparently unobtrusive and humanitarian Security Service and Defense Corps were transfigured into the massive, cruel, killing machine of the Gestapo in only three years. I understand that most American citizens agree that such a grotesque distortion could never occur in this country.
Now, permit me to use the apparently unobtrusive and humanitarian Department of Energy and, how, over the years it evolved into a force far beyond its original design. This seemingly innocuous organization experimented on pregnant women, having them ingest small amounts of radioactive material to find the effects of this carcinogen, both on the mother and on the fetus within her.
Many of the DOE sites were so mismanaged that workers were carrying radioactive material to their homes; only God knows how much illness, pain and death were caused during those 50 years of corrupt mismanagement. The judge, who ruled on the transfer of plutonium from Rocky Flats to Savannah River Site asked one quintessential question, "After 37 years, what is the urgency of moving the plutonium from Rocky Flats to SRS?"
The answer, I perceive, is a political deal, which involves the federal government's squelching of a grand jury investigation of the shabby mismanagement of Rocky Flats.
As I viewed a congressional hearing concerning the operation of the Hanford DOE facility, and watched each political representative pick up a figurative rock, to find maggots squirming beneath, I came to realize that although Congress can create an agency, it eventually loses control of that agency and, like all bureaucracies, that agency will become a self-perpetuating evil.
I pray that I am wrong but if, in 10 years, you begin to experience the oppression of an authoritarian regime, remember my words.
Harry F. Myers, Augusta
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