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To: Loud Mime
They just didn't take the simple precautions that would have prevented those acts of terror.

Well, thank God we've learned from our mistakes and we now strip search granny at the airport while allowing anyone to stroll across the southern border. /s

34 posted on 05/21/2006 8:08:39 AM PDT by randog (What the...?!)
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To: randog
Well, thank God we've learned from our mistakes and we now strip search granny at the airport while allowing anyone to stroll across the southern border. /s

I was on a five-hour cross-country flight last week where there was a problem with the restroom-occupied light at the front of the plane, so from your seat you couldn't tell if the restroom was occupied or not. Of course people ended up "loitering" near the front of the plane so they could get a chance at the restroom. At the point that the flight attendant put her foot down (as required by "federal regulations"), the two people waiting in a very short line were a female senior citizen and a dwarf.

On the return flight a couple of days later, I was honored to sit next to a Marine major, in camo, who hadn't slept since he left Baghdad 52 hours previously. He had just finished his third tour in Iraq and was headed home for some downtime. He told me he wanted to sleep, but then we had a 3-hour conversation about the war, Middle Eastern politics, and U.S. politics. I gave him every chance to beg off, but he said he really enjoyed the conversation because I asked so many intelligent questions. He said most people he runs into want to tell him what's going on over there, for example, that we're in the middle of a civil war -- which we're not.

Although he was adamant that we were winning, he had some complaints about military bureacracy. One problem that aggravated him was a problem they had in paying local translators. They desperately need Arabic speakers who understood the local culture, and were willing to pay them well, but the bureaucrats wouldn't release the money without a signed, physical timesheet. Faxes wouldn't work. Scanned PDF's signed by a colonel wouldn't work. They would send a courier out through the Red Zone in the middle of the night (the safest time) to get the timesheets to where they needed to be.

71 posted on 05/21/2006 8:58:31 AM PDT by AZLiberty (America is the hope of all men who believe in the principle of freedom and justice. - A. Einstein)
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