…time on my hands, one thing I did to keep myself entertained was watch a lot of movies. One of them was Covert One: The Hades Factor.

I never saw it the “first time around”, as it were, and when I ran across it and saw that it was based (though loosely) on work by the late suspense/espionage novelist Robert Ludlum, I thought I’d buy it. So I did.

The premise of the film boiled down to Islamic terrorists smuggling a biological agent into the United States…by infecting themselves with it prior to entering the country, then coming into the U.S. before the symptoms became visible.

Had the bad guys been along the lines of, say, Nicholas Baader (though he reportedly, as did his girlfriend and co-terrorist Gudrun Enslin, hung himself in his prison cell at the end of things) most IRA types or the various and sundry terrorist groups in South America, I’d have done what I do with a lot of action films — let it go in one eye and out the other and enjoy the story and the action as intended, for its pure entertainment value.

However, most western fanatics plan and execute their operations with the intention of surviving them. They will place their explosive devices and then get out of Dodge before the big bang or they will open fire on their targets from safe vantage points and have their escape routes planned. They will kidnap and demand ransom or political concessions, or they will kidnap and murder. The ones with the brown curduroy pants, burgundy sweater vests and coke bottle glasses might email computer viruses to their “oppressors” while the eco-terrorists burn down peoples’ houses or hammer nails into trees so as to cause grave injury to loggers.

But they all have one thing in common: They don’t want to die in the course of “championing” their causes.

Islamic terrorists, however, thrive on the concept of murdering themselves along with the soft targets they specialize in killing.

The U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut over two decades ago. The scores of Muslims who strap on suicide vests in the name of Allah and walk into crowds, restaurants, hotel lobbies, board buses, etc and happily blow themselves up along with the people around them. The 9/11 hijackers, who knew long before that terrible day that when it arrived, they would be crashing airplanes into buildings.

Professionally, I’ve long considered the probability (as opposed to possibility) that al-Qaeda or affiliates thereof would one day lay hands on biological weapons. Looking at it from their point of view, a bio attack would be far more logistically feasible than one involving a suitcase nuke — radioactive materials are far more easily detected than are micro-organisms, and the technology used to address the former concern is abundantly deployed beyond, for obvious reasons, the radar of the mainstream media. The NYT would publish instantly, under the pretext of outrage that the jackbooted thugs of the Bush regime were invading the privacy and human rights of innocent Americans (including the children) by monitoring their radiation levels, or some such idiocy (liberals don’t pay much attention to the logic or intelligence employed in the course of their diatribes, they just spew whatever it is they spew and assume that those on the receiving end will perceive it as mature, sane and logical).

Back, however, to The Hades Factor.

Early on, the main character, played by Stephen Dorff (actually, to me the main character was Mira Sorvino’s, but that’s just me), an expert on biological warfare, is asked at a conference, as a speaker, if a bio attack is preventable, and he replies in the negative.

He is absolutely correct.

From Osama’s POV, while a mushroom cloud over Manhattan would be great PR, well, as a default scenario, millions of Americans writhing in the purest agony, emergency rooms overflowing and American cities and the commerce within paralyzed while the government scrambled helplessly and ineffectually to do something about it would be just fine. Hell, break open that bottle of non-alcoholic Piper-Hiedsieck and let’s party! C’mon, let’s get some good tunes playing in this damn cave, let’s dance! Eat hummus, be merry!

What’s to stop such an attack, once the bad guys get their hands on a bio agent, from happening? If a guy (or gal, for that matter) has no problem self-detonating anyway, why not simply become infected with an easily communicable virus and distribute it via the simple means of coming into contact with other people and infecting them as well? Ten family members alone would infect 30 or 40 people (spouses, children) who would in turn spread the bio agent to classmates, fellow PTA members, neighbors, employees at the grocery store, etc…

If there are a few hours or a couple of days before the symptoms become evident, the bearer of these grim tidings needs only pass through Customs and Immigration with a legitimate front. Yeah, yeah, there’s a terrorist watch list and all that. Right. They search Habib’s luggage and find nothing, because the national security threat is flowing through his veins or his lymphatic system or whatever.

Imagine 100 or so such terrorists entering this country as tourists, students or businessmen, deploying into all of our largest cities.

I’m not trying to be an alarmist here, I’m simply pointing out a very real, very grim reality.

The threat, however, doesn’t end with the above. Rather, it is enforced by our own legal system or, to be more precise, the liberal attorneys (think ACLU and that ilk) who are more concerned with defending the rights of our enemies than they are with protecting the very lives of Americans in America.

These cowardly folks of low degree simply assume that the government they assail will protect them from the disastrous results of their arguably treasonous lawsuits. Stupid idea. You don’t disable your protection and then expect to be protected.

To be blunt: Our most lethal and most immediate enemy consists almost homogeneously of Arab Muslims, and they demonstrated, on 9/11, that they are highly skilled at entering our country legally, studying the means of executing a terrorist attack against us in our own learning institutions and then carrying out their plan.

The Bush Administration has done a fantastic job of protecting the United States and those of us living here from terrorism for over six years, but…Dubya’s done so under artillery fire from the MSM, who have done all they could to undermine his efforts.

The long and short of it is that in order to at least attempt to prevent a bio attack, the administration (not only this one, but all those that follow until we’ve decisively beaten Islam in this war that our own government misnames “The War On Terror” –we are not at war with some guys in a cave, we are at war with a faschistic political system disguised as a religion) needs to become as tough, if not tougher, than the Israelis are when it comes to letting people fly into their country or even board one of their commercial airplanes.

Remember that old Bob Dylan line I quoted some time ago?

“And if my (thought) dreams could be seen

they’d probably put my head in a guillotine…”

Well, I know exactly where he was coming from….