At least I’ll assume (I know, assume makes an “ass” out of UME), to judge by the sense of logic, patriotism and common sense Obama has demonstrated as POTUS to date, that the graduate of the corrupt Chicago machine won’t heed the advice of these former DCIs. After all, the Obama credo is “politics before the people.”

Seven of the 10 living former CIA chiefs Friday urged President Obama to overrule his attorney general and not reopen investigations into CIA employees who may have abused detainees during the George W. Bush administration.

The former directors warned that further investigations would demoralize current CIA officers and might also lead allied intelligence services to suspend or scale back cooperation with the United States because the judicial probes could disclose joint operations and activities.

Why should Obama care about compromising methods and personnel? His good fiends friends at the New York Times certainly didn’t care about that kind of thing during the Bush Administration, when they blared every counter-terrorist program or strategy they could get their teeth into in order to play politics at the peril of the American people, just as Mr. O would likely have no qualms about.

If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but to judge, as a horse handicapper might say, from Past Performances, it’s a good bet I’m right.

On Aug. 24, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed a federal prosecutor, John Durham, to review cases against CIA officers suspected of exceeding Justice Department guidelines for interrogations of terrorist suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The decision to reopen the cases was controversial in part because the Justice Department under the Bush administration had already considered the charges and declined to prosecute the officers.

In a letter released Friday, the former directors of the CIA, who included Democratic and Republican appointees, wrote: “If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless. Those men and women who undertake difficult intelligence assignments in the aftermath of an attack such as September 11 must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions.”

The entire article is here.

While we’re visiting the Washington Times, anyway, I’d like to direct your attention to the picture of Nancy Pelosi in this article.

Doesn’t she look like she uses the same cosmetic surgeon as the late Michael Jackson?

Well, lookee here!

The Obama administration has asked Congress to extend three contentious provisions of the USA Patriot Act - a bill once described by President Obama as “shoddy” - and urged an appeals court to deny access to U.S. courts for detainees at a military prison in Afghanistan.

Can’t get enough
of that “shoddy” stuff…

Civil liberties groups immediately criticized both moves, which would extend Bush-era terrorism policies that have long been unpopular with Democrats.

In a letter made public Tuesday, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich wrote to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, asking Congress to reauthorize three portions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire at the end of the year.

Well, we might say that now that he’s in the hot seat himself, maybe B. Hussein Obama realizes that perhaps there were some good reasons for some of the Bush anti-tango policies.

Then, on the other hand,

The three portions permit roving wiretaps, the seizure of certain business records and the monitoring of suspected “lone wolf” terrorists. Mr. Weich said the administration is willing to consider modifications that provide additional privacy protections provided they do not undermine the effectiveness of the provisions.

roving wiretaps and the seizure of “certain business records” somehow go hand in hand with the kind of communistic government the Obama and Pelosi seem hell bent on delivering.

If Bush could use these provisions to protect us from terrorism, why can’t Obama use them to keep a weather eye on us in the event that there are conservative “subversives” afoot?

While we’re on the subject,

…deny access to U.S. courts for detainees at a military prison in Afghanistan…

Hey! Is that you, O?

Tell me it ain’t so!

…on some of the content of my 9/11 post, there was an interesting article in U.S.A. Today* the other day regarding the differences of opinion as to how strong a threat the terrorist organization actually is, or remains to be.

In the eight years since the 9/11 attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller has spent nearly the entire time focused on one enemy: al-Qaeda.

Thousands of terrorist operatives have been killed or captured. Terrorist safe havens and training grounds in Afghanistan where operatives were trained have been destroyed. Military forces largely have shattered al-Qaeda’s leadership in Iraq. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, who once closely managed al-Qaeda’s day-to-day operations, have been driven into seclusion.

Now, Mueller and counterterrorism analysts are tracking the emergence of a new threat. Al-Qaeda has morphed into a fractured network of small terrorist franchises strewn across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In Yemen, according to Senate testimony by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, a “jihadist battleground” is rising amid growing political upheaval and poverty. Blair says there are concerns that al-Qaeda could establish a “regional base of operations” in Yemen to train operatives and plot new attacks against the West.

Okay.

Al-Qaeda’s transformation raises an unsettling question: Does its splintering help make the USA and its Western allies safer, or does it complicate efforts to guard against terrorism?

“Yes, they retain the capability of striking overseas,” Mueller says in an interview, declining to specify whether the USA is vulnerable to such an attack. “They are still lethal.”

Although al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 command structure no longer exists, its smaller terror cells are freer to conceive and direct their own operations, making them increasingly unpredictable. Several analysts worried about a terror resurgence cite evidence that pieces of al-Qaeda are gathering strength in Yemen and Somalia. Yemen’s stability is especially crucial to U.S. interests because of its strategic location on the Arabian Peninsula, its access to critical shipping lanes and its vast border with the world’s largest oil supplier, Saudi Arabia.

There is “growing concern that al-Qaeda will begin providing social and civil services to the people of Yemen on a scale that could challenge the Yemen government for allegiance,” says Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen analyst based at Princeton University.

This is not at all unheard of where sizeable Islamofascist guerilla organizations are concerned. As a prime example, look how Hamas perpetuated and strengthened its influence by becoming a political party among the “Palestinians”, and Hezbollah has done the same thing in Lebanon, ostensibly providing services and other positive social products that are either not delivered or are not delivered as well by official government.

If al-Qaeda and its affiliates expand in Yemen and other weakened states, he says, the “danger to the U.S. is quite great.”

Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director who oversaw the bureau’s Baghdad operations, says that “in one sense, you are safer because al-Qaeda no longer has that (pre-9/11) chain of command. On the other hand, al-Qaeda has become so decentralized, it can be harder to stop. … It’s like a dormant volcano.”

This is true — fragmented, without a central chain of command, al-Qaeda leaves no single chain to follow to any one nucleus of command. As I said in the 9/11 post, what we see now are what amount to a number of franchises. Basically autonymous franchises.

Other terrorism analysts, however, say government officials refuse to admit the threat al-Qaeda once posed largely has passed.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” says Marc Sageman, a former CIA officer and prominent al-Qaeda analyst, citing his own analysis, which suggests that al-Qaeda’s capability to strike targets in the West is declining. “There is not much left of al-Qaeda except in the minds of those inside the (Washington) Beltway.”

Sure, and pigs might fly.

We still see the hand of al-Qaeda active in places like Indonesia (Jemaah Islamiyah, for example, led by a demon-on-earth called Noordin Mohammed Top) in which terrorist attacks, because of their remoteness on the globe in terms of “relevant” political hotspots, don’t get nearly the fanfare in the media that the same events taking place, say, in Britain, Spain or France would.

And of course when terrorists strike in Israel, the world media, the U.N. and the E.U. tend not to notice that anything’s amiss until the Israelis retaliate or otherwise defend themselves. But that’s another story entirely.

At any rate, these now splintered off, independent franchises merely make it harder for the good guys to focus on a single, tangible enemy entity.

Mueller says much of the danger now comes from a “genre” of hybrid groups spawned by the destruction of al-Qaeda safe havens. Separate groups, which share al-Qaeda’s philosophy of eliminating Western influence from Muslim areas, have been inspired by al-Qaeda.

Among those groups, Mueller says, is the Pakistani militant organization Lashkar-e-Taiba, which he says is responsible for last November’s attack in Mumbai, India, that killed 166 people.

Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Yemen claimed responsibility for two strikes against the U.S. Embassy in Sana last year. One was a coordinated assault last September that killed 17 people, including the six attackers.

Remember, having not evolved along with the rest of mankind over the centuries, Islam still resides in the age when Mohammed cursed the earth with his satanic presence.

Fundamentalist Muslims live with a mindset totally alien to our own, one that countenances mass, cold blooded murder of men, women and children in the name of their so-called god (allah) and the martyrdom of their youth (never, of course, of the so-called “holy men” who preach martyrdom and/or send these naive fools out to die) in the performance of butchery of the innocent.

“These guys think in terms of decades and centuries,” says Phil Mudd, executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch. “The challenge is whether you can keep the pressure on.

“It’s a shark’s mouth,” he says of al-Qaeda’s resiliency. “You have to keep taking the teeth out again and again. You can’t allow the teeth to rotate to the front.”

Well said!

Read the entire U.S.A. Today article here.

* U.S.A. Today does have its “moments”, and this is one of them.

…and the eighth anniversary of the heinous attack on our nation by the evil forces of the death cult known as Islam.

Normally, “anniversary” denotes something positive, the date of something wonderful, a first meeting, a marriage, something pleasantly or lovingly memorable.

This anniversary does not.

Eight years.

Americans are almost 3,000 days removed from the Sept. 11 terror attacks that toppled the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 people — nearly the same amount of time it took al Qaeda plotters to regroup from their failed bid to take down the Twin Towers in 1993.

While former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani says not a day goes by that he doesn’t think of Sept. 11, for most Americans, that crisp, sunny morning of horror seems a lifetime ago, and, frankly, something they’d rather forget.

We must not forget, for the threat of repetition, perhaps not via the same method as the last time, not only still exists, but the satanic beast spawned by Islam that perpetrated that horror has grown exponentially, its tentacles multiplying, franchise-style, each with its own autonymous license to commit mass murder in the name of Allah.

Despite counter-terrorism successes and the absence of a major and dramatic attack in the West, the security threat posed by radical Islamists remains real and dynamic, as al-Qaeda mutates into an increasingly unstructured but no less dangerous entity, according to experts monitoring the organization.

As Americans and others around the world mark the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders continue to elude security forces and intelligence services.

But the threat facing the U.S. and its allies goes far beyond the Saudi fugitive and his coterie, to extremists embracing al-Qaeda’s ideology but largely operationally independent, a situation that complicates efforts to anticipate and disrupt plots.

Over the year since the last 9/11 anniversary, such terrorists have killed hundreds of people in attacks including those targeting the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, and luxury hotels in Jakarta.

“Today, the primary terrorist threat to our country’s interests – persons aligned with al-Qaeda – has evolved from different but related groups into a more coherent movement under a common ideology,” Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess said Thursday.

“Top leaders simply announce their priorities, which the group’s members and allies may interpret and execute against targets of their own choice,” he said in an address at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Burgess said these methods enable “a span of terrorist violence across the world that is unprecedented in its unity of vision, regardless of the degree to which the overall command and control is splintered.”

“Hundreds of attacks every year are committed by militants sanctioned by or under the name of al-Qaeda,” he said.

As the Muslim population continues to grow here in the United States, I believe that so does the possibility — hell, probability, of further attacks.

Look at all the other places in the world where the Muslim percentages of the overall populations are high, outside, of course, those countries ruled by Islamic governments.

Almost all of them are hotbeds of terrorist activity, for the Muslims therein realize that their numbers are strong enough to afford them the chance, through their historically bloody methodology, to impose their fascistic brand of religion, politics and social order on the unwilling that constitute the majorities of these places. To force them to submit, which is what Islam means.

The United States has only been spared further attacks due to the diligence of the Bush Administration in preventing them, the efforts of the FBI, our various intelligence agencies and our brave military personnel overseas who fight Islamofascism tooth and nail.

President Obama has vowed the United States “will not falter” in the pursuit of al-Qaida.

Obama has distanced himself from many of the anti-terror policies of former President George W. Bush, but his remarks recalled Bush’s speech to Congress in the immediate aftermath of the attacks: “We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.”

Right. Barack Hussein Obama has promised all sorts of things he has made transparently plain he has no intention of delivering on, while insisting that he will. We, the People, he believes, are very stupid, indeed.

Let’s just hope that on this one issue, he keeps his word so that we do not have another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and that he is able to “rally the world” to the cause of destroying Islamic terrorism, root and branch, everywhere in the world it rears its head.

That said, my prayers go out to all those who died on 11 September 2001 as victims and as those who sacrificed their lives in the course of their brave, selfless efforts to save others.

My condolences and prayers, also, to the families and friends of those lost on that terrible day in Manhattan, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania.

Wolf here.

I’ve seen some pretty stupid and self destructive actions performed in my day by people who should at least have the sense of responsibility to think things through, weighing the pros and cons, before they act, of the decisions they make and the execution of what they’ve decided upon.

Unfortunately, and this goes not only for B. Hussein Obama but for the rest of that pack of dishonest scoundrels who call themselves Democrats these days.

They play politics, thinking only of their partisan ambitions without a thought to the good of America and the people who elected them to lead the nation.

They twist the truth and the accomplishments of potential victims of their political agendas to meet the requirements of those agendas.

Obama’s agenda, whatever it may be, certainly bides no good for this country, its economic future, its national security, our rights and freedoms, the values we hold dear, those that make us unique among nations, our morality, and his actions to date bear this up.

Now, to appease his “get Bush, Cheney and all their issue” base, Obama is attacking the CIA for operating, they were assured at the time, within the law.

Of course, we’re talking a renegade government run by Obama, Pelosi and Reid (Frankencense and Murtha?), and all the lies that come with it.

President Obama on Monday paid his first formal visit to CIA headquarters, in order, as he put it, to “underscore the importance” of the agency and let its staff “know that you’ve got my full support.” Assuming he means it, the President should immediately declassify all memos concerning what intelligence was gleaned, and what plots foiled, by the interrogations of high-level al Qaeda detainees in the wake of September 11.

This suggestion was first made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who said he found it “a little bit disturbing” that the Obama Administration had decided to release four Justice Department memos detailing the CIA’s interrogation practices while not giving the full picture of what the interrogations yielded in actionable intelligence. Yes, it really is disturbing, especially given the bogus media narrative that has now developed around those memos.

bogus media narrative is the only kind of media narrative these days, and for some reason “bogus” and “Obama” seem to coexist easily in the same piece of thought.

This shows how bold, thanks entirely to the relative lack of awareness among the American people (read that as not paying attention to the little dictatorship style government we have developed since the third week of January), the liberals who control the Democratic party have become.

I’ll tell you something, people. Seth has said this to me before, and I have come to agree with him: If we allow these politicians to continue to go this far without voting the lot of them out of office, we, as a country, deserve every bit of shit they will eventually bury us in. It’s every voter’s sacred responsibility to study hard on what the government is doing, what our politicians are up to.

In other words, CIA interrogators wanted to use these techniques in 2002 to break a terrorist they believed had information that could potentially save American lives. Rest assured that if the CIA hadn’t taken these steps and the U.S. had been hit again, the same people denouncing these memos now would have been demanding another 9/11 Commission to deplore their inaction.

Gotta love them fuckin’ traitors Democrats. So crooked and sleazy honest and fair.

The memos give considerable indication both of the sheer quantity, as well as some of the specifics, of the intelligence gathered through the interrogations. “You have informed us,” wrote Mr. Bradbury in the May 30, 2005 memo, “that the interrogation of KSM — once enhanced techniques were employed — led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles. You have informed us that information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of . . . Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell . . . tasked with the execution of the ‘Second Wave.’”

All in all, Mr. Bybee added, “the intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of CTC’s [the CIA's Counterterrorist Center] reporting on al Qaeda.”

In a saner world (or at least one that accurately reported on original documents), all of this would be a point of pride for the CIA. It would serve as evidence of the Bush Administration’s scrupulousness regarding the life and health of the detainees, and demonstrate how wrong are the claims that harsh interrogations yielded no useful intelligence.

The above emphasis is mine.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch,

The Obama administration’s decision to release a previously classified 2004 CIA interrogation report and appoint a special prosecutor to look into possible misdeeds by personnel involved in questioning high-value terrorists is a huge mistake.

It’s almost as if - in addition to the war in Iraq, Afghanistan and on terror - the Obama administration has now declared war on the CIA, which is one of our most important assets in gathering intelligence for winning these conflicts.

First, these choices will likely have a chilling effect on the morale at the agency. Earlier this year Barack Obama himself vowed it was time to look forward, not back. (Of course, that is until it’s time to look back.)

In addition to being another Obama policy flip-flop, these decisions will likely leave officers in the field wondering whether they should be more concerned about getting terrorists or getting lawyers.

I can tell you first hand here that I know exactly where Mr. Brookes is coming from. Thank God I’m retired!

It’s also a major distraction to the CIA’s embattled director Leon Panetta, who seems to be drowning in a sea of inquiries from his White House and the Democratic Congress. Doesn’t he have more important things to look after, like Iran and North Korea?

(Some believe Panetta won’t be around much longer, giving the already-rattled CIA its sixth leader since 9/11.)

How about a dose of reality, here, Mr. O?

It isn’t by chance that we haven’t been attacked in nearly eight years. Former Vice President Dick Cheney said that we owe the CIA a debt of gratitude for keeping us safe.

It’s a sentiment the Obama administration should really consider before it goes any further.

Wolf out.

…General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker wasted their valuable time testifying before Congress.

Oliver North tells it like it is.

Five years ago this week, American soldiers and Marines liberated Baghdad from Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard and the foreign fedayeen who had flooded into the despot’s capital. For those of us who were there, it was an unforgettable event. But as Ambassador Ryan Crocker so cogently noted this week while he and Gen. David Petraeus were testifying before Congress, “The euphoria of that moment evaporated long ago.” The assembled lawmakers, perched on their raised daises, barely noted the anniversary — while subjecting the warrior and the diplomat to a 16-hour spectacle. For the general and the ambassador, it had to be an excruciating exercise in patience and bladder control.

The hearings — two in the Senate and two more in the House — all were choreographed carefully to give maximum exposure to the potentates on the Potomac. The masters of the mainstream media all were gathered. Professional protesters were present. The solons, all carefully prepared by their staffs, made their little speeches and then shamelessly angled for the best “gotcha” question to win the sound bite sweepstakes — and the honor of being replayed repeatedly on the news and entertainment channels. Like so many of these hearings, it was a bit like Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” — without a ringmaster. I know — as they say — I’ve “been there, done that.”

Yeah, he’s “been there, done that”, all right (and I can’t say I envy the man for that particular ordeal, when I worked on Wall Street some quarter century ago, my immediate supervisor, who had gone through a congressional grilling over the Hunt Brothers affair, told me in graphic detail what that’s like), though I don’t know if he was ever issued the tee-shirt. I’ll say this though: Despite the rhetoric of our political left, the man is the kind of patriot this country needs a hell of a lot more of, and the kind of journalist the media should be proud of (fat chance of that!) — the kind who calls it like he sees it and retains the perspective that he is an American who knows what it means to serve his country in time of war. The kind of guy who would rather cover a combat situation with shrapnel and bullets whizzing past his head than sit in a lounge in the “Green Zone” and get his information second hand, or buy photos from some photographer who may or may not have Photo-Shopped them to favor the enemy’s propaganda campaigns.

Sadly, the attending members of Congress evinced little interest in hearing from a decorated general fighting a bloody military campaign or a skillful U.S. ambassador trying to help a democratically elected government survive against brutal foreign and internal foes. Rather, it seemed as if our elected representatives would have preferred hearing from soothsayers who could read palms and interpret horoscopes. That our Congress has sunk to such a level is a sad testament to the state of our political process.

Sadly, indeed.

Our Democrat-run Congress isn’t interested in facts, only in a political agenda that hasn’t got room for the concept of victory or for the elements of common sense necessary to protect our country from future terrorist attacks. In order to appeal to their political base, which consists of a Code Pink/Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan (remember her?)/George Soros/Jane Fonda/Barbra Streissand mentality, they are more concerned with an agenda that would involve our abandoning the Iraqis to an Islamic extremist take-over and the resulting Taliban style rule that would transform Iraq into what would amount to a terrorist stronghold with “legitimate” nation status.

This is a very liberal “progressive” point of view. Let’s enjoy instant gratification without giving the proverbial rat’s hind quarters about whatever tragedies it will present for us down the road apiece.

So rather than ask pertinent questions or seek the truth about our brave troops’ progress in Iraq…

When will it end? When will we be out? When can we take the money we’re spending on the war and divert it to bailing out our constituent borrowers and lenders caught up in the subprime mortgage mess? Petraeus and Crocker came equipped with facts, maps, charts and progress reports, but for this crowd, they should have brought Ouija boards, tarot cards and a crystal ball.

I don’t know, though I can guess, how fellow right thinkers and other sane Americans feel about this, but speaking for myself, I find it rather chilling that the majority of those we’ve elected to lead our country seem to be addressing this grave responsibility we’ve bestowed upon them using a far left field (perhaps pre-adolescent would be a more accurate term) approach.

They apparently don’t see fit to apply any sort of reality to their reasoning, that’s for sure, it’s more like “screw the down-the-road penalties, get the votes now!”

Well, good for them! When suicide bombers, briefed in Baghdad, walk into restaurants, theatres, shopping malls and other crowded places in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and Duluth and blow themselves up along with scores of men, women and children, our fearless leaders can always “blame Bush”.

Speaking of whom…

While Congress was berating the general and the ambassador, the commander in chief was honoring one of the more than 4,000 Americans who have made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq. In an Oval Office ceremony, President Bush presented the Medal of Honor — our nation’s highest award for valor — to the parents of Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael A. Monsoor, a Navy SEAL. Mike — as his fellow SEALs called him — was killed Sept. 29, 2006, in Ramadi, Iraq, when he threw himself on top of an enemy grenade in order to spare the lives of his fellow SEALs.

His platoon commander, now a lieutenant commander with whom our Fox News team has been embedded, said of the 25-year-old hero, “He made an instantaneous decision to save our teammates.” Though wounded by shrapnel in the explosion, one of those with him that terrible morning said of Monsoor’s unhesitating action: “He never took his eyes off the grenade. His only movement was down toward it. He undoubtedly saved mine and the other SEALs’ lives.”

Monsoor is just the fourth member of our armed forces to be awarded the Medal of Honor since war was declared against us Sept. 11, 2001. Call your grandstanding members of Congress and ask whether they know the four names.

Hmmmm, let’s see, there were Corporal Jason Dunham, USMC, U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Paul Smith and Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor, Iraq, and U.S. Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, Afghanistan.

Saying “Thank you” is not nearly enough.

I wonder if Representative John Murtha knows these four names or, for that matter, if he even cares. Probably not.

…nobody managed to “slip” through on purpose with a lethal souvenir letter opener or a deadly disposable cigarette lighter…

The TSA spokesman said testing shows that the agency has a “very high success rate” in detecting firearms.

…I was kind of tied up yesterday and so, since key aspects of the below described affair have been sources of outrage to me, both as an advocate of justice and an American, since two dedicated Border Patrol agents were railroaded into prison by a scumbag in Federal Prosecutor’s clothing.

The allegasd {Seth’s note: Obvious misprint, mispelling or typo of “alleged” — disgraceful editing} Mexican drug smuggler shot by Border Patrol agents as he tried to dodge arrest in 2005 will appear in federal court in El Paso, Texas, on Friday afternoon.

Osvaldo Aldrete Davila, 27, was arrested Thursday on a drug smuggling offense at a U.S. port of entry. A federal grand jury handed down a sealed indictment on Oct. 17.

Aldrete was granted immunity in 2005 in exchange for testifying against ex-border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

The two Border Patrol agents were sentenced to 11 and 12 years, respectively, for shooting Aldrete as he tried to sneak about million dollars’ worth of marijuana into the country. He was shot in the buttocks while running toward the Mexican border.

Right, the mutt was granted immunity by a legal representative of the United States Government, whom, unless he was on the payroll of a Mexican drug cartel, profoundly stupid or peaking on pure L.S.D. (actually, to be fair, I believe Sutton was kissing up to The Boss, who is paradoxically pro-homeland security and pro-an open border with Mexico at the same time), knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was calling to the witness stand a career criminal whose resume included felonies in at least two countries, including the U.S., to testify against and decimate the careers and futures of these two agents, Ramos and Compean, destroying their families at the same time.

I seem to recall, however, that while the testimony of felons (other than those willing to convict themselves — often with immunity to prosecution though more often a reduced sentence) as an incentive to testify against their own organizations or comrades is considered admissible, the same does not apply to those of questionable background in other circumstances.

I mean, giving official creedence to a drug smuggler who is testifying against a couple of people whose job is to catch and arrest them is beyond the absurd.

Aldrete now faces two counts of possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance, one count of conspiracy to import a controlled substance and one count of conspiracy to possess a controlled substance with intent to distribute.

The alleged offenses happened between June 1, 2005 and Nov. 30, 2005, which is when the government gave Aldrete a pass to enter and exit the country unsupervised, primarily to get medical treatment for his bullet wound.

Aldrete and his co-defendant, Cipriano Ortiz Hernandez, conspired to import and distribute more than 100 kilograms of marijuana on Sept. 24, 2005, and again on Oct. 22 and 23 that same year, according to the charges. (The second alleged offense happened after Aldrete was granted immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony against the agents.)

I don’t know how anybody else feels about this (though I have a good idea where the sane are concerned), but this whole Aldrete immunity thing, to my way of thinking, makes the DOJ look pretty foolish. They grant immunity to a Mexican drug trafficker in exchange for his testimony crucifying American law enforcement agents and he uses the immunity as an opportunity to smuggle more drugs.

Sutton also is prosecuting the Aldrete case. He has been blasted by advocates of the border agents for not bringing charges against Aldrete sooner.

“I have repeatedly said that if we obtained sufficient competent and admissible evidence against Aldrete, we could prosecute him,” Sutton said in a statement. “Members of my office have worked closely with agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration for many months to investigate Aldrete’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking.”

At a Senate hearing this summer on the border agents case, Sutton was non-committal in answering questions about the October drug offense by Aldrete. Some senators pressed Sutton to explain why Aldrete was allowed to enter and leave the country in the run-up to the border agents’ trial.

Advocates of the border agents also have complained that the Aldrete’s alleged October drug smuggling did not come up at the trial of Ramos and Compean.

So Sutton is reneging on his deal with Aldrete, if not in a letter-of-the-law manner, in a “sorry, pal, but you’re cooked… My career is more important than honoring any agreements I make with criminals.”

What a sleazeball this guy is! He sells out both sides in order to further his own career. This is as contemptible an excuse for a…

At any rate, the entire article is here.

There has been no excuse for GWB not pardoning Ramos and Compean without reservation.

Truth to tell and actually a repetition of what I expressed among my earlier posts on this situation, I actually believe that a mere pardon wouldn’t be anywhere near enough.

1. The two agents should be pardoned and reinstated, with all accumulated and earned seniority, to their jobs, and receive all retroactive pay.

2. They should be compensated by the gov’t for all their legal fees and,

3. They and their families should be restored, via full taxpayer expense, to the exact same situation (homeowners with X mortgage debts, etc) that they were in prior to the screwing they received from their own government, the one they served.

What these two guys are being screwed for, coming right down to it, is thinking on their feet.

When a bunch of bureaucrats who’ve never been in danger are empowered to make the rules for those who work in danger, this is what we get.

Fun example: Over 30 years ago, in the early stages of my security career, I worked undercover on the wharves in New Orleans (not that it’s applicable, but my CW was a Colt Python). This was not the same kind of post as the lobby of an office building or whatever, it was a perpetually violent situation. Whenever the job got exciting, both the New Orleans Harbor Police and U.S. Customs were also involved.

As a UC, I held supervisory authority over our uniforms on the wharves, and as such had to deal with management contact.

At one such meeting, I was actually told by a company founder/owner, concerned about liability, that the new policy was that should anyone pull a weapon on me, I should “shoot it out of his hand”.

After I was done laughing, I said, “I have a better idea. How ’bout if I call time out, call you and have you come down and shoot the gun out of the guy’s hand!?”

My point here is that when you hire and train people to protect you, you need to allow them to handle situations as they see fit…you know, think for themselves, as they’re there and you’re not, and you have to back them up.

If I were a U.S. Border Patrol agent, knowing that the Bush Administration condones prosecuting agents for doing their jobs, I would quit. There are too many other ways to serve our country without being punished for doing what we were told we were hired for.

…”catching up” posts.

First, there’s an excellent column by Caroline Glick on the ongoing western policy of appeasement in the face of what I personally prefer to term aggressive Islam.

MUSLIM MINORITIES throughout the world are being financed and ideologically trained in Saudi and UAE funded mosques and Islamic centers. These minorities act in strikingly similar manners in the countries where they are situated throughout the world. On the one hand, their local political leaders demand extraordinary communal rights, rights accorded neither to the national majority nor to other minority populations. On the other hand, Muslim neighborhoods, particularly in Europe, but also in Israel, the Philippines and Australia, are rendered increasingly ungovernable as arms of the state like the police and tax authorities come under attack when they attempt to assert state power in these Muslim communities.

Logic would have it that targeted states would respond to the threat to their authority through a dual strategy. On the one hand, they would firmly assert their authority by enforcing their laws against both individual lawbreakers and against subversive, foreign financed institutions that incite the overthrow of their governments and their replacement with Islamic governments. On the other hand, they would seek out and empower local Muslims who accept the authority and legitimacy of their states and their rule of law.

Unfortunately, with the notable exception of the Howard government in Australia, in country after country, governments respond to this challenge by attempting to appease Muslim irredentists and their state sponsors. The British responded to the July 7, 2005 bombings by giving representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood an official role in crafting and carrying out counter-terror policies.

In 2003, then French president Jacques Chirac sent then interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy to Egypt to seek the permission of Sheikh Mohammed Tantawi of the Islamist al-Azhar mosque for the French parliament’s plan to outlaw hijabs in French schools.

In the US, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI asked the terror-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations to conduct sensitivity training for FBI agents.

In Holland last year, the Dutch government effectively expelled anti-Islamist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the interest of currying favor with Holland’s restive Muslim minority.

At the minimum, I would say that sanity does not seem to prevail here; They are in the minority in all these countries, yet their demands are complied with post-haste, even to the point of exceeding accommodations accorded the majority in a respective host population.

This acquiescence is not restricted to laws of a social nature, on the contrary it has found its way into global politics.

THE FOREIGN policy aspect of the rush to appease is twofold. First, targeted states refuse to support one another when individual governments attempt to use the tools of law enforcement to handle their domestic jihad threat. For instance, European states have harshly criticized the US Patriot Act while the US criticized the French decision to prohibit the hijab in public schools.

More acutely, targeted states lead the charge in calling for the establishment of Muslim-only states. Today the US and the EU are leading the charge towards the establishment of a Palestinian state and the creation of an independent state of Kosovo.

In two weeks, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will host the Annapolis conference where together with her European and Arab counterparts, she will exert enormous pressure on the Olmert government to agree to the establishment of a jihadist Palestinian state in Israel’s heartland with its capital in Jerusalem and its sovereignty extending over Judaism’s most sacred site, the Temple Mount.

The establishment of the sought-for Palestinian state presupposes the ethnic cleansing of at a minimum 80,000 Israelis from their homes and communities simply because they are Jews. Jews of course will be prohibited from living in Palestine.

To continue,

FOR ITS part, the Palestinian leadership to which Israel will be expected to communicate its acceptance of the establishment of Palestine, is one part criminal, and two parts jihadist. As Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues have made clear, while they are willing to accept Israel’s concessions, they are not willing to accept Israel. This is why they refuse to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

A rare consensus exists today in Israel. From the far-left to the far-right, from IDF Military Intelligence to the Mossad, all agree that the Annapolis conference will fail to bring a peace accord. Since Rice’s approach to reaching just such an accord has been to apply unrelenting pressure on Israel, it is fairly clear that she will blame Israel for the conference’s preordained failure and cause a further deterioration in US-Israeli relations.

While Israel is supposed to accept a Jew-free Palestine, it goes without saying that its own 20 percent Arab minority will continue to enjoy the full rights of Israeli citizenship. Yet one of the direct consequences of the establishment of a Jew-free, pro-jihadist State of Palestine will be the further radicalization of Israeli Arabs. They will intensify their current rejection of Israel’s national identity.

With Palestinian and outside support, they will intensify their irredentist activities and so exert an even more devastating attack on Israel’s sovereignty and right to national self-determination.

“Ma zeh?” {Hebrew for “what’s this?”} you may ask. Well, one answer is that it’s lackluster diplomacy — you know, just like what an employer might expect from a lazy employee of the “sweep under a rug” persuasion. The politicians and diplomats on the western side of the equation want only to put the Israeli-”Palestinian” affair to bed once and for all, the consequences of any expediency be damned, and as a bonus, giving Israel the fid will also fulfill the requisites of The New Dhimmitude©.

SHORTLY AFTER the Annapolis conference fails, and no doubt in a bid to buck up its standing with the Arab world, the US may well stand by its stated intention to recognize the independence of Kosovo.

Yeah, well,

As Julia Gorin

(Julia is profoundly well informed on affairs in the Balkans, and the bulk of her columns specialize therein)

documented in a recent article here, in Jewish World Review, Kosovo’s connections with Albanian criminal syndicates and global jihadists are legion. Moreover, Kosovar independence would likely spur irredentist movements among the Muslim minorities in all Balkan states. In Macedonia for instance, a quarter of the population is Muslim. These irredentist movements in turn would increase Muslim irredentism throughout Europe just as Palestinian statehood will foment an intensification of the Islamization of Israel’s Arab minority.

The Kosovo government announced last month that given the diplomatic impasse, it plans to declare its independence next month. Currently, the Bush administration is signaling its willingness to recognize an independent Kosovo even though doing so will threaten US-Russian relations.

In a bid both to prevent the Bush administration from turning on Israel in the aftermath of the failure of the Annapolis conference and to make clear Israel’s own rejection of the notion that a “solution” to the Palestinian conflict with Israel can be imposed by foreign powers, the Olmert government should immediately and loudly restate its opposition to the imposition of Kosovar independence on Serbia.

In the interest of defending the nation-state system, on which American sovereignty and foreign policy is based, the US should reassess the logic of its support for the establishment of Muslim-only states. It should similarly revisit its refusal to openly support the right of non-Islamic states like Israel, Serbia and even France, to assert their rights to defend their sovereignty, national security and national character from outside-sponsored domestic Islamic subversion.

There’s a lot more happening in Ms. Glick’s column, which can be read in its entirety here.

In my mind’s ear (if there can be a mind’s eye, there must surely also exist a mind’s ear) I keep hearing the phrase, “The creep of Islam”.

“Moving right along”…

This is really funny. Put down your coffee cup before you listen.

A car accident happened in the Dallas-Ft.Worth area.

This is a recorded phone call from a man who witnessed the accident involving four elderly women. It was so popular when they played it on the local radio station the station decided to put it on their website.

Next up, and while the following articles are several days old they are by no means historical,

Nearly two dozen illegal immigrants were arrested Wednesday, accused of using fake security badges to work in critical areas of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, including the tarmac, authorities said.

The 23 illegal workers were employed by Ideal Staffing Solutions Inc., whose corporate secretary and office manager also were arrested after an eight-month investigation that involved federal, state and Chicago authorities.

The company contracted work for carriers including UAL Corp.’s (UAUA) United Airlines, KLM and Qantas Airways Ltd. (QAN.AU), said Elissa A. Brown, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

“The investigation identifies a vulnerability that could compromise national security, while bringing criminal charges against individuals who built an illegal work force into their business practice,” Brown said.

Read the entire article here.

As if that weren’t enough,

The Transportation Security Administration touts its programs to ensure security by using undercover operatives to test its airport screeners. In one instance, however, the agency thwarted such a test by alerting screeners across the country that it was under way, even providing descriptions of the undercover agents.

The government routinely runs covert tests at airports to ensure that security measures in place are sufficient to stop a terrorist from bringing something dangerous onto an airplane.
Alerting screeners when the undercover officer is coming through and what the person looks like would defeat the purpose.

But that’s exactly what happened April 28, 2006, according to an e-mail from a top TSA official who oversees security operations.

This one’s a real winner, read on…

On the one hand, we have airports hiring HR contractors who make a practice of endangering the lives of scores, hundreds or thousands of people and on the other, the government agency responsible for U.S. airport security is rigging security inspections to make it appear that they are doing their job.

No matter how much effort I put into it, I can’t find even the slightest hint of justification for the above two situations. Does this make me a bad person?

Some people definitely need to be punished to the fullest extent that the law allows, some people need to be replaced and some people need to be majorly retrained….

…that I have somewhere along the line become a stone Internet (© Algore) addict, the last half week supplied all the proof I need.

I lit up Mr. Inspiron at Zero Dark Hundred Hours on Thursday to find a blue screen informing me that I couldn’t come in, because there was something-or-other afoot that would damage my computer if I did.

“Bummer,” I thought.

I called Dell Tech Support, went through the usual Pomp & Circumstance you go through before you find yourself in touch with a human being in the proper department, and was dumbfounded when I discovered that the homosapien in question was, while obviously elsewhere in the world (it’s hard to say whether she was a Latina or a Bangalorian, and I’ve always been really good with accents, but I think that was because her English, diction and vocabulary both, was nothing short of excellent), was eminently understandable, profoundly knowledgeable and had a real ease about her, the kind that comes, part and parcel, with experience. Our entire exchange was more a conversation, including some mutually enjoyed humorous asides, than it was a report/response exchange.

Her diagnosis was that I needed to reinstall Windows XP Professional, using the back-up CD they should have sent me with my notebook. She also told me that when I’d purchased the computer, Dell hadn’t been including the XP disc among the others in the box, so she had to overnight it to me. She made the soonest appointment available (for she or someone from her unit to call me and walk me through the reinstall, once I had the CD), which was for Saturday Afternoon.

Aaargh!!!! I was contemplating up to 2 1/2 days without being able to get online from a PJ-friendly environment! I repeat, Aaargh!

I must confess to a certain degree of withdrawal symptoms, probably like a heroin addict “Jonesing”, only without the physical stress. To pontificate and employ more scientific language, well, let’s just say it sucked.

So yesterday, a Dell Dude, also uncharacteristically knowledgeable and with undeterminate accent, called and we did the thing with the CD, which entailed him calling me back a few times while the disc took its time doing its job.

After that, it took 2 restarts and I was back in business.

Being of the half full and silver lining persuation by nature, I will say that my computer’s performance has improved quite a bit since the CD and the Dell folks did what they did, it turns out that a lot of a slowness of loading, despite the fastest DSL available from AT&T/Yahoo!, was as much the fault of some sort of deterioration in my operating platform as it was from the drag (as opposed to thrust) of IE-7.

Boy, don’t I sound high-tech…

Back on-line, I was confronted by a highly daunting quantity of emails to reply to, emailed news/opinion subscription venues to work my way through and 2 1/2 days’ worth of spam that goes around the filters thanks to what is hopefully only negligence on the part of Blogspot (don’t blame “Desenex”, I’m a Munuvian and I use Word Press: They allow megaspammers to use their servers — the only spam that penetrates into my comment sections have Blogspot URLs, and they come both simultaneously and in large quantities). Blogspot is apparently hosting a movie sequel: I, Spambot.

Plus, I have two days’ worth of catching up to do as regards visiting the sites of many, many fellow bloggers, which for me is a priority pursuit after eating and sleeping.

Okay…

Now that we’ve gotten the above “adventure” out of the way, the first thing I want to do is express my intense satisfaction at the election of Bobby Jindal as governor of Louisiana.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal easily defeated 11 opponents and became the state’s first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction, decades after his parents moved to the state from India to pursue the American dream.

Jindal, a 36-year-old Republican, will be the nation’s youngest governor. He had 53 percent with 625,036 votes with about 92 percent of the vote tallied. It was more than enough to win Saturday’s election outright and avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.

This guy is phenomenal, he’s one of those rare politicians who embrace the concept of what I tend to think of as “practice over theory”. He does stuff rather than expound upon it, and at the relatively young age of 36 he has won the respect and confidence of the vast majority (just look at the figures, and these published by Yahoo!, a highly liberal, PC client of the Associated Press) of Louisiana voters.

I lived in Nawlins for many years in earlier periods of my adult life, from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s, from days when the Superdome and the Hibernia Tower were pretty much the city’s skyline to an era in which there is a full skyline of modern hotels and other high rises.

Truth to tell, I preferred things the old way — I so miss pre-high tech architecture (from back in the days when men were men and sheep were scared — sorry, my own sense of humor, as bizarre as it sometimes happens to be, rendered it impossible for me not to interject that particular semi-appropriate cliche), when an architect was someone who designed buildings via creativity rather than computer model and a mason was permitted to add artistic detail to the project.

But as usual, I digress…

Remember my admission re “half full” and “silver lining”s? Well, keeping in mind Hurricane Katrina’s introduction of profound tragedy to the Crescent City and much of the rest of southern Louisiana, with its resultant out-of-state relocation of so many residents (here, at risk of sounding like the racist I’m not — this is for any readers who tow the PC line rather than the realism one) from the low-income neighborhoods that produce gang bangers and related homicides and draw the bulk of public largesse, and the fact that residents of parishes like Orleans and Jefferson hold the same kind of sway at the polls that NYC voters do in New York State politics, my own interpretation of the Jindal victory is that:

Louisiana voters see their present circumstances as an opportunity to fix the presently (and historically) corrupt, southern Democrat “old boy network” run political system, and they’ve voted in Jindal, exactly “the man for the job”.

Bravo to the Louisiana electorate!

The next item I would have posted on had I not encountered my computer problem would have been linking this must read column by Diana West.

In my opinion, the most powerful segment reads:

The point of my talk — based on my new book, “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization” (linked below) — was to explain why perpetual adolescence is not just a cultural drag, but also dangerous to our way of life. I argued that the leveling of adult authority over the past half century or so was accompanied by a leveling of cultural authority.

This brought on the age of multiculturalism, a time when Western Civ (like the adult) no longer occupies its old pinnacle atop the hierarchy of cultures. The multiculti conception of equally valuable cultures (except for the West, which is deemed the pits) depends on a strenuous non-judgmentalism. This non-judgmentalism expresses itself in a self-censoring adherence to political correctness.

Such non-judgmentalism, such PC self-censorship, is infantilizing because it requires us to suppress our faculties of analysis and judgment.

Finally, we come to one of those topics that’s near and dear, as they say, to my heart: Security.

Security screeners at two of the nation’s busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY.

Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows.

At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, screeners missed about 60% of hidden bomb materials that were packed in everyday carry-ons — including toiletry kits, briefcases and CD players. San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private firm instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows. The TSA ran about 70 tests at Los Angeles, 75 at Chicago and 145 at San Francisco.

How comforting is that?

Anyone who has visited here over the last couple of years knows that as a protection professional I’ve kinda-sorta expressed my doubts where the TSA, at ground level, is concerned.

From my own considerable domestic airport experience (speaking strictly as a traveller), my personal top rating for professionalism in post-9/11 passenger screening goes to Logan International — those folks have no intention of allowing a second 9/11 from taking off out of Boston.

Look, my air travel is haphazard, I usually fly on short notice and, if the trip is multi-city, I take things one-way by one-way. The security programming in post 9/11 airline reservations systems often forwards requests that TSA search the luggage of/wand the bearers of one way or “day or two before reservations” fares and/or give them “special attention”. I have no problem with that. All “out of the norm” situations should be investigated.

As a human being, I tend to look at issues with the inclusion of “pros” & “cons”.

That is pretty much why I thought I should bring up this product.

Privacy experts are concerned that a full body x-ray scanner the Transportation Security Administration is testing will produce such revealing images that they could violate Americans’ civil liberties. And some experts, who see no civil liberty problems, think the machines are too expensive, too bulky, and not needed given current security procedures at airports.

“We are not convinced that it is the right thing for America,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Program. “We are skeptical of the privacy safeguards that the TSA is touting.”

TSA, which operates under the Department of Homeland Security, will be testing the Active Millimeter Wave body scanners at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, with plans to test machines at New York’s JFK and LAX in Los Angeles over the next few months.

TSA will also purchase eight millimeter wave units at a cost of $1.7 million to be used in other cities.

WTF is a “privacy expert”? Is this a bona fide job title or professional designation?

According to TSA, the process — a voluntary alternative to a pat-down during secondary screening — works as follows: A passenger steps into the machine and remains still for a matter of seconds, in two different positions, while the technology creates a three-dimensional image of the passenger from two antennas that simultaneously rotate around the body. Once complete the passenger steps through the opposite side of the millimeter wave portal.

The scanner’s manufacturers, L3 Communications, said the machine “penetrates clothing and packaging to reveal and pinpoint hidden weapons, explosives, drugs, and other contraband,” calling it “more reliable and less intrusive than pat-down searches.”

Yet “this technology produces strikingly graphic images of passengers’ bodies,” said Steinhardt. “Those images reveal not only our private body parts, but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags.”

“That degree of examination amounts to a significant - and for some people, humiliating - assault on the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate,” he said.

Before I comment on the immediate above, read this:

“They say that they are obscuring faces, but that is just a software fix that can be undone as easily as it is applied,” warned Steinhardt. “And obscuring faces does not hide the fact that the rest of the body will be vividly displayed.”

“Over time, the personnel operating this system will get mischievous, and it will be misused in ways that are very offensive,” added Jim Harper, director of Information Policy Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Right.

“Yo, Ralph! This guy’s wearing a colostomy bag!”

Haw, Haw!!!!

What a bunch of Bee Ess!

Who gives a xxxx?

This is a typical liberal pitch, based upon “what if?” — “This could happen, so we need to flee, capitulate or downright surrender, to do otherwise would be politically incorrect!”

The above paragraph defines those on the far left to the letter.

Thank G-d that we right thinkers don’t follow the same directives that are adhered to by the left.

Okay, that should more than adequately convey my own attitude on the subject.

My other concern here is that –

TSA chief Kip Hawley, responding to previous reports about screeners missing hidden weapons, told a House hearing Tuesday that high failure rates stem from increasingly difficult covert tests that require screeners to find bomb parts the size of a pen cap. “We moved from testing of completely assembled bombs … to the small component parts,” he said.

This is total bullshit (© El Toro). It is “in name only” security. Either you secure a venue or you don’t, period. If you own a dress factory, it’s okay to hire seamstresses who skylark as they work, but if you run a security department, contractor or agency you’d damn well better employ people who can stay focused and for whom you’ve spent whatever sums it takes to see that they are trained and prepared for every eventuality, in their area of responsibility, that might come to pass.

Ex: A friend of mine was the security director for a major tenant brokerage firm in the World Trade Center at the time of the first bombing, which occured on the front end of a weekend. When the markets opened on Monday, he had relocated all the brokers, etc to a location on Hudson Street and they were doing business as though nothing had happened.

Ex 2: When I was employed in casino security in Nevada years ago, I was fortunate enough to work for a security director who believed in training the #&*%^$#& out of his floor officers, investigators and supervisors (After coming in at entry level, I was all of the these as time progressed). We attended classes, courses, workshops, lectures, etc in every area that even remotely affected us and our responsibilities, and it all paid off majorly for the casino in a number of ways that would require either a book or an extremely long post to even scratch…

To continue, however,

Terrorists bringing a homemade bomb on an airplane, or bringing on bomb parts and assembling them in the cabin, is the top threat against aviation. “Their focus is on using items easily available off grocery and hardware store shelves,” Hawley said.

In My Personal and Professional Opinion (s), security concerns are paramount in both the Public and Private sectors, and costs should never enter into the equation. If you’re a guest in My House and tragedy ensues, I’ll put my life on the line to ensure that you emerge unharmed.

Period.