I can remember when the kind of mental instability involved with the two gun incidents on his record would have disallowed him for a secret clearance.
The problem now seems to be that our intelligence agencies are no longer working for our country. In fact, they seem to be working against it.
I was in the shooting at ESL (a defense company in Sunnyvale, Ca) back in 1989. The shooter, Richard Farley, had a top secret clearance. I know he had been fired from the company for stalking one of the employees, but I don’t know if his clearance was taken away or not.
Clearances don’t give you that much information on people.
It’s just really bad if you’ve gone bankrupt!!
he’s black so no one can say no
I knew a guy who joined the Navy in 1982. He was promised a rate that required a secret clearance. They had to send him home from boot camp because he failed the clearance check. He had a speeding ticket on his record.
I worked for an employer where many of the old-timers still working there remember when being a homosexual would have gotten you fired. It would have been seen as a security risk because homosexuals were considered to be mentally unstable. Now they have homo week every year and people who utter the words ‘fag’ or ‘queer’ get fired because that’s discrimination. The old guys just shake their heads whenever they talk about it. The guys who remember the cold war are retiring or dieing off at an alarming rate. The knowledge and experience of the workforce is slowly draining away. Their replacements can’t even hold a candle to ‘em.
Hell, I know a younger guy with felony drug charges in his past who was given a clearance! I couldn’t believe it when they did that. So what if he’s clean now? He was convicted of dealing drugs at work! They didn’t have to give him a clearance. He could have just worked in uncleared areas. It wouldn’t have effected his paycheck one cent. But, no, there he goes into secure areas to work.
Dammit, we sure are diverse now and that’s what really matters, right? </s
That fact that no one was fired or imprisoned after Nidal Hassan proves your theory.
Secret clearance is not all that difficult nor important. The government really does it to protect itself. That way anything classified at all has the person under a prosecutable signature not to reveal.
The real stuff is top secret and the special clearances.
And, if things are still same, an entrance national agency check is sufficient to get a temporary secret clearance.
That means this guy had to have his name run through the computer systems of those agencies, and those agencies did not raise the alarm. Somehow, whatever he’d done in the past had not been flagged in their computers.
I’d rather have Putin’s FSB in charge of our national security, that’s how bad it’s gotten. Could Russia do any more damage than this administration has?
“...would have disallowed him for a secret clearance....”
Ah! but! perfect for our purpose..........”
/sarc