Posted on 10/17/2007 12:52:15 PM PDT by smoothsailing
Luke looking for terrorists?
By Ralph R. Reiland
Monday, October 15, 2007
Where would Pittsburgh's anti-terrorism van have been that August night if the mayor hadn't taken it to the Toby Keith concert? Riding around Brookline looking for al-Qaida? Checking out Ali Baba in Oakland? I'd say that Luke Ravenstahl got it right that night, whether by design or chance, in terms of national security.
The Department of Homeland Security, seeing Pittsburgh as a potential target of Islamic fundamentalists, gave us the GMC Yukon for surveillance, to identify potential terrorism targets, and for intelligence gathering -- to ride around and keep an eye out for anything that looks suspicious or out of place.
The vehicle isn't a tank. There's no button on the dashboard to launch a surface-to-air missile and knock down an incoming plane that's been taken over by a gang of religious martyrs. The vehicle is just for blending in, for shadowing, especially in target-rich environments.
Now, pretend for a minute that you're a full-blown jihadist in Pittsburgh, looking for the fight of your life that night in August. Downtown's dead. The Marine recruiting offices are closed. The mall movies are ho-hum. Hands down, there's no better place to explode yourself than in front of a jingoistic country singer who has a crowd all pumped up with his two-fisted response to 9/11:
When you rattle his cage
And you'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A.
'Cause we'll put in a boot in your ass
It's the American way."
U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan is investigating whether our federally-supplied anti-jihad asset was misallocated. It's my guess that the Toby Keith concert was probably the only time the Yukon was in the right place at the right time...........
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
Yes, that’s just the car to blend unnoticeably into a slum, isn’t it?
Aren’t bureacrats wonderful? Not to speak of politicians.
:-)
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Wotta punk.
is THAT the mayor?
Of course it does.
They spent the last two weekends at NASCAR events. complete with shots and papers. I bet they had a suite so as to lessen their exposure to the good ol Budweiser drinking, American Pride, Jack Daniels and Coke Brigade, wearing the Home Depot Jackets. Might be a virus around common people. I bet they even screened the catering.
Ya know, the air outside of Washington DC must be really bad for them to show such concern for the common folk as to actually show concern for common citizens to come out from their ivory tower and tell us they are concerned.
Why don’t they park on the southern border with Mexico for a couple of days if they want to see a real homeland security threat and invasion!!!!
That’s him.
W&J Grad, even. < |:(~
Took over when the former Mayor croaked in office.
Youngest Pittsburgh mayor ever.
he looks like he needs a smack.
looks like they are doing some weird line dance thang... ; )
It looks as if they’ve just come out of the closet.
In "What Does Homeland Security Spending Buy?" -- published in 2005 by the American Enterprise Institute -- Veronique de Rugy provides clear evidence of how the nation's security resources have been squandered. For example:
• $500,000 spent by Outagamie, Wis. -- population 165,000 and hardly a top al-Qaida target -- to buy chemical suits, generators, rescue saws, disaster-response trailers, emergency lighting, escape hoods and a bomb-disposal vehicle.
• $30,000 used by officials in Lake County, Tenn., to help a high school buy a defibrillator to have on hand for a baseball tournament.
• $557,400 awarded to North Pole, a town in Alaska with a population of 1,570, for homeland security rescue and communication equipment.
• $98,000 spent on a training course in incident management by the Tecumseh Fire Department in Lenawee County, Mo., that no one attended.
• $63,000 spent on a decontamination unit that ended up in storage in a warehouse in rural Washington because the state didn't have a hazmat team to use it.
• $58,000 for a rescue vehicle capable of boring through concrete in Colchester, a Vermont town with a population of 18,000.
There's also anti-terrorism money for D.C.'s summer jobs program and port protection in Martha's Vineyard. "At Christmas, the Department of Homeland Security handed out about $153 million for programs offering food and shelter for the poor, to be spent in 2004," reports Rugy. Perhaps our security experts viewed the homeless as potential al-Qaida recruits.
That, and the Mayor is a putz!
Looks like a late 18th-century can-can.
;)PaMom
I'll never understand that goofy lingo. I can't even figure out why anybody whould want to munch on a Primanti's sandwich. Why goof up a sandwich by putting fries on it?
But what do I know, I've only lived around here for ten years. Shucks, Mom, I'm from Carolina, where people talk proper.
Now ain't that a hoot, honey-chile!!!! ;-)
Actually, if different (i.e., manual) excerpting had been done, that point might have made it across...rather than the focus on the mayor.
From the article:
The real issue here has nothing to do with the mayor. The van shouldn't even be in Pittsburgh, not when there's not enough money in the budget to train agents in Islamic languages and the radiation detection equipment deployed to screen cargo containers can't tell the difference between highly enriched uranium and Comet cleanser.
The real problem is the massive misallocation of the nation's limited anti-terrorism resources, a federal bureaucracy that's passing out free SUVs and treating billions in anti-terrorism spending as just so much more pork to be passed around, regardless of any meaningful risk assessments or cost-benefit analysis.
Manual posting, my sweet patootie, read my post again and then go to the link, and then come back here and tell me I did auto-posting. I could care less about the mayor, I just like Toby Keith's song.
And here it is again....
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