"HOw many trees must I kill?"As many as you can. The woods are lousy with them.
I can't see the forest because of them.
Posted on 08/24/2004 6:43:26 PM PDT by wagglebee
After less than a year of campaigning, John Kerry has already given the American public a chilling preview of the misguided choices he would make in the unlikely event he is elected president.
Kerry hired leftist Joseph Wilson – proven liar – as a foreign-policy advisor, only to dismiss the Pinocchio-like former ambassador after the bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously discredited his claims that there were no attempts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger and that his wife had no role in getting the CIA to send him to Niger.
Kerry hired leftist Sandy Berger – self-admitted pilferer – as another of his foreign-policy advisors, only to dismiss him after the former national security advisor under Clinton was caught appropriating secret documents from the National Archives.
Kerry hired leftist Dr. Susan E. Rice to replace Berger. A former NSA advisor to Berger, former secretary of state for African affairs under Clinton, and former advisor to Howard Dean, Rice’s stellar credentials included playing a central role in the former administration's appeasement of Osama Bin Laden and in the decision to refuse an offer from the Sudan to hand him over in 1996-1997 – before his murderous henchmen bombed the U.S. embassies in Africa. An advocate of fighting terror through “law enforcement” and “neighborhood watches,” Rice now whispers in Kerry’s ear on matters of international terrorism.
Kerry hired former Dean advisor and Marxist-embracing, anti-Catholic Mara Vanderslice as his so-called religious outreach advisor, fully aware that among her hateful activities was spitting on the Eucharist at a protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, only to dismiss her when the Catholic League waged a successful protest.
Kerry than hired Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson, who was again slammed by Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, for being one of 32 members of the clergy to file a court brief on behalf of the atheist who challenged the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, whereupon Peterson resigned after only two weeks.
These are but a few examples of Kerry’s impaired judgment about whom and which philosophies are good for the United States of America.
It gets worse. But a little history must precede Kerry’s scariest choice.
Kerry Drops the Ball Before 9/11
Four months before Sept. 11, 2001, recently retired Brian Sullivan, a former risk-management specialist (for over 10 years) in charge of physical security of air-traffic control towers and air-route traffic control facilities in New England, was so concerned about the lax security at Logan Airport that he wrote a letter to Sen. Kerry, warning him of the potential for a terrorist disaster at the airport. Sullivan followed up by sending Kerry a videotape that showed the ease with which undercover reporters had successfully penetrated Logan’s security screening 10 times with potentially deadly weapons.
For three months, “I’ll protect America” Kerry did nothing with the information, finally sending it to the one agency (the Department of Transportation’s Office of the Inspector General: DOT OIG), that Sullivan had specifically told him had been consistently remiss in taking action after such warnings.
Two of the four planes that attacked our nation on September 11 took off from Logan Airport and 80 of Kerry’s constituents died. Yet Kerry, who held evidence in his hands of Logan’s vulnerabilities, has yet to explain his failure to take meaningful action – action that well may have prevented the horrors of that fateful day.
When questioned about this failure, the same Kerry who has recently insisted that his trip to Cambodia in 1968 was “seared – seared” in his memory, claimed that he “sounded the alarm prior to 9/11" and that he was told by the DOT that “they were doing an undercover operation" at Logan. Of course, neither was true: he didn’t “sound the alarm” and there was no federal security undercover investigation at Logan during the summer of 2001!
Look Who Else Dropped the Ball!
Significantly, Sullivan also filed a complaint with the Hotline of the Federal Aviation Administration’s chief administrator Jane Garvey (a Clinton holdover) and had the incriminating videotape delivered to her office.
Who is Jane Garvey? In the mid-‘90s, she was the former top administrator at Logan Airport, where it was no secret that the airport’s security system was riddled with problems. Strangely, however, the unremarkable job she did at Logan was thought worthy of reward by the Clinton administration.
In a gesture that served to affirm the validity of the Peter Principle – in which people are promoted until they reach their ultimate level of incompetence – Clinton appointed Garvey to be director of the FAA in 1997.
During her tenure, Sullivan said, “FAA security personnel were placed in key management positions despite their limited experience in air security and their apparent ideological aversion to prescreen high-suspect people”: i.e., Arab males from the Middle East between the ages of 20-40.
Two years after Garvey took the helm, the FAA fined the Massachusetts Port Authority $178,000 for 136 security violations at Logan that included failure to screen baggage properly and allowing easy access to restricted areas and parked planes. On one occasion, a 17-year-old man cut the razor wire on a perimeter fence surrounding Logan and walked for two miles across restricted areas, finally stowing away on a British Airways Boeing 747.
Were those violations addressed? Did Garvey’s FAA follow up? In the criminal indictment she never received, surely Exhibit A would have been September 11!
“I thought that as the former director of the Massachusetts Port Authority at Logan and then head of the FAA,” Sullivan said, “Garvey might take a personal interest in the information about Logan's insecurity in the lead up to 9/11. I was wrong!”
Garvey’s Failures Exhaustively Documented
It is public knowledge that during the spring and summer of 2001, Garvey’s FAA sent out a CD-ROM of potential terrorist threats prepared by her security chief, Mike Canavan, to 700 airlines and airport executives. The FAA also had extensive data about Al Qaida and bin Laden in its Criminal Acts Against Civil Aviation reports for 1999 and 2000.
But when Garvey testified before the 9/11 Commission, she claimed ignorance of any threats – saying that she hadn’t seen the CD-ROM until after September 11! Which was apparently her inexcusable excuse for failing to alert the National Security Council and President Bush!
To wit, the 9/11 Commission's report, page 83, states: "… the FAA's intelligence unit did not receive much attention from the agency's leadership. Neither Administrator Jane Garvey nor her deputy routinely reviewed daily intelligence, and what they did see was screened for them. She was unaware of a great amount of hijacking threat information from her own intelligence unit, which, in turn, was not deeply involved in the agency's policymaking process. Historically, decisive security action took place only after (my emphasis) a disaster had occurred or a specific plot had been discovered."
Further, according to Kevin Berger of Salon.com, commenting on reaction to the 9/11 Commission’s Report: “The focus on the wrenching series of failures among intelligence groups is important and justified. But all of the international intrigue, not to mention partisan sniping over what president or government agency was at fault, has deflected attention from the one culprit that gets a universal thrashing in the 9/11 report: the Federal Aviation Administration.
Jane Garvey’s FAA, that is.
More of Garvey’s Failures
Berger further documents the 9/11 Commission’s findings of the grievous failings of the FAA under Garvey:
Each layer of the FAA that was relevant to hijackings – intelligence, passenger prescreening, checkpoint screening, and onboard security – was seriously flawed.
Although government watch lists contained the names of tens of thousands of known terrorists, including a State Department TIP-OFF list with 60,000 names, the FAA's own "no-fly" list contained names of just 12 terrorist suspects.
At Logan’s check-in counters, airline clerks tagged four of the five hijackers on American Flight 11 (the first jet to hit the World Trade Center) as suspect, yet they were allowed to board the plane.
Two of the hijackers on American Flight 77 from Dulles, which crashed into the Pentagon, set off the security gate alarm but the screeners didn't bother to investigate further and, again, allowed the hijackers to board the plane.
And most damning, Jane Garvey did not review daily intelligence and so was "unaware of a great amount of hijacking threat information from her own intelligence unit."
It was also under Garvey that the then-Computer Assisted Passenger Profiling System, or CAPPS I was neutered. After 9/11, the program was renamed the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPs II, because, according to Sullivan, “of overzealous liberals, the American Civil Liberties Union and the diversity crowd who are hell-bent on insuring that political correctness is always implemented at the expense of our basic security.”
And Sullivan cites additional flaws in Garvey’s FAA, all of them omitted from the 9/11 Commission’s report. For instance:
An April '01 memo from the director of security, Joe Lawless, of the Massachusetts Port Authority, citing terrorist ties to Logan Airport and the need to address known vulnerabilities there.
The rejection of another Lawless memo by the Logan Airline Managers Council (LAMCO) and the FAA's federal security manager at Logan, proposing that the Mass. State Police begin undercover testing of screening checkpoints in July '01.
Reported sightings of Mohammed Atta at Logan in May and early September '01, involved in suspicious activity on the Air Operations Area and surveillance of checkpoints. Garvey’s Failures Continue
Yet all this is not where Garvey’s egregious mismanagement of the FAA ends. According to New York Times reporter Matthew L. Wald, Garvey ignored both past incidents and those under her watch, including:
1994: The hijacking of two jetliners (one by an Islamic “militant” group) with the intent of “crashing them into buildings.”
1994: A man stormed the cockpit of a domestic flight with the intention, according to his fellow employees, of crashing the plane into a building in Memphis.
1994: A lone pilot crashed a stolen single-engine Cessna into a tree on the White House grounds near the president's bedroom.
1996: The crash of T.W.A. Flight 800, which to this day many people believe was a terrorist attack.
1999: A report of an exiled Islamic leader in Britain who said in August 1998 that bin Laden would ''bring down an airliner or hijack an airliner to humiliate the United States.''
2000: The FAA’s annual report saying that although Osama bin Laden ''is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so…bin Laden's anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation.”
“But aviation security officials,” Wald said, “never extrapolated any sort of pattern from those incidents.” That includes the top official, the FAA’s Jane Garvey.
The Garvey-Kerry Connection
All of which brings us to Kerry’s scariest choice.
Of all the security experts in the United States – which include former or active police chiefs, retired FBI and CIA operatives and private companies that spend 24/7/365 assessing threats and formulating “coping” strategies – Kerry chose Garvey as an “expert” consultant IN CHARGE OF SECURITY for the Democratic National Convention.
That’s right, Jane Garvey, who was singled out by the “we won’t point fingers” 9/11 Commission as taking action “only after a disaster had occurred …” and whose FAA got “a universal thrashing” in the report.
A commentary in Aviation Insight & Perspectives said that: “Appointing Garvey head of convention security is like making John Gotti the head of the FBI.”
But that’s exactly what Kerry did. And now, according to the Journal of Commerce, Garvey’s name “repeatedly surfaces as a likely candidate for transportation secretary” and she “is also privately advising the Kerry campaign on transport issues” (a role she denies is “formal”).
Well, why not? After all, it was ultra-liberal Sen. Kerry and his ultra-liberal colleague, Sen. Ted Kennedy, who appointed Garvey to head the FAA in the first place. It is now crystal clear that Kerry, like Clinton before him, subscribes wholeheartedly to the Peter Principle!
Sadly, according to Brian Sullivan, “one single recommendation from the Gore Commission in 1997 to harden cockpit doors and enforce rules to keep them closed would have stopped the 9/11 attack cold. If the FAA’s Garvey, the darling of the Democrats, and DOT’s chief Norman Mineta, the darling of the diversity crowd, hadn’t been asleep at the wheel, 9/11 wouldn't have happened, plain and simple.”
But it did happen and now we’re left to ponder how Kerry arrives at his disastrous choices?
A Cast of Thousands
According to recent reports, in contrast to the dozen or so experts that compose President Bush’s campaign advisory staff, the Kerry campaign has 37 separate domestic-policy councils and 27 foreign-policy groups, each with dozens of members; a justice-policy taskforce and environmental taskforce that both include 195 participants; and 200 economic policy advisers.
Ostensibly, none of them could come up with anyone more qualified and less tainted in matters of national security than Jane Garvey! Or perhaps they had no say in the matter and it was Kerry alone and his by now highly questionable judgment that brought about this odd choice.
But you can’t say that Kerry is not consistent – especially considering that Garvey now joins the candidate’s ever-lengthening list of bad choices.
What does this say about the man who is now running around the country trying to convince American citizens that his four months in Vietnam 35 years ago – which is now being called into serious question – and his 20 remarkably unremarkable years in the Senate even minimally qualifies him to make the crucial – indeed, life-and-death – choices that will keep us SAFE?
Perhaps we should turn to the person closest to Kerry for an answer. In the latest edition of Reader’s Digest, none other than Teresa Heinz Kerry, when asked if her husband were qualified to be president of the United States, said: "I think nobody is truly qualified to be President of the United States. … I mean, are you qualified to run the world … not run it, but have that influence? No, nobody is."
Well, actually, Teresa, somebody is. His name is George W. Bush.
Sorry, I ran a search and it didn't come up.
Another printing bump. HOw many trees must I kill?
Lord, I wish this was read on every TV news broadcast in the country...wishful thinking...
Don't go getting carried away or anything. . .
As many as you can. The woods are lousy with them. I can't hardly ride my mufflerless diesel dirtbike with out ripping the bark off them. They just make running down little furry things into quivering exhaustion so much harder.
As many as you can. The woods are lousy with them. I can't hardly ride my mufflerless diesel dirtbike with out ripping the bark off them. They just make running down little furry things into quivering exhaustion so much harder.
^
If Kerry wins, America loses Everything!!
Have you noticed that both the skerry's use the evita peron hands crossed on chest bow?
"HOw many trees must I kill?"As many as you can. The woods are lousy with them.
I can't see the forest because of them.
Still an all, an excellent read....no matter who posted it first.
Take that!!......TomServo...ye who taketh bribes from the posting police.
Yeah - in beer...;-)
Holy crap. This is the most telling article of why Kerry has no business being President.
This is what should be focused on. This is the type of decisions that idiot makes.
He will get us all killed.
I knew there was a reason I liked you.
Same here, FP.
I believe you're buying the next round. ;-)
I didn't want any animosity just because I screwed up a search! :)
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