Politics & Power Quote by Randy Forbes

There is a lot of careful throat-clearing packed into Forbes's "Since the tragedies" opener, a phrase that politely sidesteps naming 9/11 while still summoning its moral gravity. That vagueness isn't accidental; it turns a specific event into a permanent state of justification. In the post-9/11 political lexicon, "the tragedies" functions like a verbal badge: it signals seriousness, preempts dissent, and frames whatever follows as an obvious necessity rather than a debatable policy choice.

The sentence then performs a classic act of institutional storytelling. DHS is presented not as a massive bureaucratic merger with tradeoffs, but as an almost surgical response with a clean mission: prevent attacks. The real rhetorical move comes with "most importantly, to share intelligence information". After 9/11, the bipartisan diagnosis was "failure to connect the dots" - interagency silos, rivalries, and classification barriers. By elevating information-sharing above even prevention, Forbes taps that consensus and recasts DHS as a coordination machine rather than a surveillance apparatus.

Subtext: critics can argue about airport lines, overreach, or mission creep, but who wants to argue against agencies sharing information to stop terrorism? The line quietly implies that any friction - privacy concerns, civil liberties, bureaucratic overcollection - is a lesser problem than the danger outside. Contextually, this is the language of an era when security architecture was being defended not by granular results, but by the promise that the government had finally learned how to talk to itself.