Homeland Security

So embarrassing was the episode of a border guard allowing TB Andy to cross into the United States from Canada on his multinational infectious disease tour that you might think Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would send a directive to all HSS employees to wake up and pay attention to detail. You’d be wrong if you thought such a thing.

Here’s a short story about my husband flying from Sacramento, Calif., to Washington, D.C., just two short days ago.

My husband John went to the airport kiosk Tuesday to print out his boarding pass and luggage tickets, but the boarding pass got stuck in the machine. Fortunately, he was able to make eye contact with an airline attendant, who offered assistance. The attendant, being a technical whiz, stuck his hand up the machine, dislodged the wadded-up boarding pass and handed it to John, who then proceeded to go through security checkpoint.  Read more...

Just when we need it — a blow for liberty!

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, George Bush has acted as if he’s above the law — tapping phones without a court order, prying into credit card records without a search warrant, torturing prisoners of war — and, most egregiously, rounding up suspects and detaining them for years without charging them with any crime or putting them on trial.

Finally, a federal court has said: Enough’s enough. Read more...

The president went to Europe and won a big victory. Vladimir Putin has changed his mind and won’t aim missiles at Europe, and actually agreed to talk about cooperation on missile defense.

This is the kind of victory that made Ronald Reagan the icon that all Republicans love today. But for Bush it was largely hidden by the setback on the immigration bill.

It is hard to say whether this immigration bill will be revived. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) says that it will be, but I wouldn’t count on it. The failure in the Senate is a failure of Senate Democratic leadership, but that is not how the majority leader spun it. He blamed President Bush, even though it was Reid’s decision to move forward on a cloture vote that few of the supporters thought was yet ripe. Read more...

Most people who voted in our latest Quick Poll don't think they need as long as our military commanders do to decide whether the troop surge in Iraq is working. We asked whether September was too soon to know, and the answer that came back was a resounding "No."

The margin? 84% to 16%.

Watch out for another Quick Poll question on the site tomorrow.

The American government needs to stop celebrating the arraignments of four men over the weekend, believing it helped foil a terrorist plot.Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said it best: “Today’s arrests remind us that we’re at war … But the reality is that today’s arrests remind me of the fact that we have to stay on offense against terrorists.” That is exactly what both Americans and the American government need to remember.

Unfortunately, it happened almost six years ago, and it can easily happen again. No matter how many plots we halt, there is never a guarantee that terrorism, terrorists or mindless idiots will be eliminated from our society. Read more...

With past threats of infectious diseases having plagued the world and scared us several times over, it is not only shocking but reprehensible to hear of the 31-year-old lawyer Andrew Speaker, infected with TB, who decided to disobey orders from U.S officials and jeopardize the lives of everyone who may have been anywhere near him.

In a time where bioterrorism creates such a stir within the American public, Speaker should have used the opportunity to cooperate with the CDC and accept their warnings as a blessing to prevent any further spread of the disease.

And with constant scandals and governmental corruption, we now have a Border Patrol officer who saw the flagged passport and still allowed Speaker to cross the border. Forget the fact that Speaker felt he had no reason to obey the law. What about the officer whose job it is to make sure the laws are implemented and respected? This story screams irresponsibility, irrationality and sheer disgust. Read more...

The mainstream media insist on minimizing terror threats that our intelligence operatives quash before they can wreak mayhem and kill our people. They did it with the Sears Tower raid, the jets that were going to be destroyed over the Atlantic, the millenium attack on LAX airport, the shoe bomber, the Brooklyn Bridge attack, and Padilla the would-be dirty bomber.  In each case, the media is fond of writing how the gang could never have gotten it together to pull off the raid. They portray the attackers as clowns who were disorganized and just dabblers in terror whose case is being hyped by the right wing to stoke terror fears.

But these characterizations of real threats we faced and, thanks to our homeland security forces, thwarted are quite wrong and distorted. Had these liberal critics interviewed Mohammed Atta and his gang of 9/11 hijackers, they might have come to the same conclusion. Read more...

We have posted a new Quick Poll! on this page to see where you stand in the dispute over immigration reform: Which is more important, border security or a guest worker program? Scroll down the page and cast your vote.

After watching George Tenet being interviewed by Scott Pelley last night on “60 Minutes,” one thing became clear to me: President Bush should have put his own guy at the CIA at the beginning of his first term.

Tenet seems like he was passionate about his job. He truly wanted to protect the nation from terrorism. Of that, I have no doubt. But let’s face it. He was Clinton’s guy, and he presided over the destruction of the CIA as a fully functioning intelligence agency while he served President Clinton. He should not have stayed on with President Bush, if for no other reason than he was the choice of the president who had the lowest regard for the intelligence community in our nation’s history.
Read more...

Rudy Giuliani has raised the first cross-party issue of the 2008 election by saying that if the Democrats win, America would be forced to take the defensive in the war on terror. Clinton and Obama quickly jumped on the attack and replied that that was hitting below the belt. Point to Rudy. The Democrats, for all their strength over Iraq, are vulnerable on every other
aspect of the terror issue. Their reluctance to approve the Patriot Act, their opposition to aggressive interrogation of terror suspects, and their horror at invasions of e-mail and telephone privacy all cast them as weaker than Giuliani or the GOP in the war on terror.

Rudy's attack is a great way to defend the war in Iraq — by saying, in effect, that the best defense is a good offense. If we do not have the terrorists back on their heels, dodging from cave to cave in Afghanistan and street to street in Baghdad, they will hit us here, at home. Rudy is on the right track in making this his issue.