WHAT NEXT FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY?

(Hat tip to Bob Mack for the graphic and the link below)

Look at how the Department of Homeland Security is overreaching its original parameters:

The Department of Homeland Security’s ICE has launched a major crackdown on websites enabling copyright infringement or selling counterfeits of trademarked goods. In just the past few days ICE has seized at least 12 domains, TorrentFreak reports.

[...]

...[T]he sites were seized before the site’s owner heard any charges or had the chance to submit any counter evidence in court. The owners of the sites had their property seized without being allowed to defend themselves.

[...]

In the aftermath of 9-11, when the creation of DHS was being debated, would your opinion have been swayed if you knew that, within just a few years, the proposed agency would be seizing websites peddling fake purses? Did you imagine that the proposed agency would soon demand to take naked photographs of randomly-selected U.S. citizens? Or, insist on its authority to physically grope children?

Now, ask yourself this: What will the Agency be doing 10 years from now? Or, 20? In a little more than half a decade, DHS has morphed from protecting us from terrorists to protecting us from fake merchandise. Who is going to protect us from DHS?

Immediately following 9/11, I cheered the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. Most Americans felt the same way.

But just think of the department's powers now in the hands of an administration which is ever trying to grab more power.

OBAMA DISREGARDS THE INVASION OF ARIZONA

Surreal!

Mexican Drug Cartels Now Control Parts of Arizona - For more funny videos, click here

HOW JEOPARDIZED IS OUR NATIONAL SECURITY?

Last night, blogger Z! attended a gathering at which the speakers were Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame.

What Z has to say about what she learned with regard to how our national security is being jeopardized by BHO is a must-read!

One excerpt:

[Debra Burlingame] met with Obama regarding Gitmo and she reminded him how he'd once said how safe and good for prisoners it was there and she added that it would help if he'd elaborate on that and remind Americans of that fact. She said he simply "shrugged" and took the next question....

[...]

Debra Burlingame flashed on a screen a flier Gitmo detainees got for months....it was in Arabic and told how CRUEL and INHUMAN their treatment was there and gave ways to get out of having to answer interrogators, lies to use, etc etc. This was published by American attorneys....

HERE.

Tanker Contract Must Be National Security Priority

Under the headline, U.S. Air Force’s tanker fleet showing its age, writer Molly McMillin of the The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle shared a story Sunday about the Air Force’s aging fleet of KC-135 air refueling tankers and the $35 billion contract battle between Boeing and Northrop Grumman that has immense national security implications.

At the same time as her article evoked memories from my days as a young Air Force public affairs officer, it also stirred grave concerns about the future of our nation’s defense capabilities.

I share those memories and concerns here.

THE TERRORIST WATCH LIST

Both left and some on the right criticize the terrorist watch list and tell us how the list interferes with our freedoms and the convenience which we enjoyed before 9/11. In today's Washington Post, Leonard Boyle tells us otherwise:

The federal government's consolidated terrorist watch list has become a central issue in the debate about how we can best secure our homeland. Unfortunately, myths about the watch list continue to grow in just about every report and retelling.

How many times have you heard: There are a million terrorists on the consolidated watch list! Thousands of Americans get detained and inconvenienced daily because of watch-list errors!

There aren't. They don't.

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...There are slightly more than 1 million records on the watch list, which correspond to approximately 400,000 individuals. The vast majority of those individuals aren't in the United States right now -- and the watch list was created to keep it that way....

Read the entire essay here.

Inconvenience today will prevent another 9/11, or worse, tomorrow.

TROUBLE WAITING TO HAPPEN

Are we going to have to learn the same lesson again? From this source:

Despite tough post-9/11 laws, thousands of foreign students are training at U.S. flight schools without proper visas or security background checks, government documents show....

Surely, surely, this report is in error. We can possibly be that dumb about national security! Or can we?

LAPSES IN SECURITY

From this article in the business section of the Washington Post:

Wackenhut, a private security firm that guards 21 commercial nuclear power plants around the United States, said yesterday that its chief executive resigned during continuing controversy about guards caught napping at a Pennsylvania reactor last year.

Gary A. Sanders had been Wackenhut's chairman and chief executive since 2003. Over the past year, Sanders has been engulfed by allegations of lapses in security at nuclear plants...

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Wackenhut has already erased from its Web site the biography of Sanders, who had started working for the company in 1981...

What other facilities has Wackenhut, owed by a British security firm, been "guarding"? According to the article,

Wackenhut, based in Miami, has 35,000 employees and does a range of security work that includes guarding libraries, transporting immigration detainees for the Department of Homeland Security, and protecting the government's Y-12 complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn., where nuclear weapons and materials are stored and maintained....

As 9/11 fades into distant memory, such lapses are bound to become more common, thus leaving open the loophole which terrorists are constantly seeking.

Of course, Congress will investigate the above allegations of Wackenhut's lapses. Pardon me if I don't think much of such investigations.

REAL TORTURE

This is what REAL TORTURE looks like. Al Qaeda's torture manual shows how ridiculous Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, Rosie and so many other liberals were when they compared Abu Ghraib to regimes of horrific torture.

To read how I feel about Democrats and how serious they take national security, go here!