Lets start with a prayer sent me from a friend.
~~~We will not forget~~~
Almighty God, the past 9 years will be indelibly inscribed in our memories. We
looked with horror on the terrorist attacks of September 11th. But we looked with
honor on acts of courage by ordinary people who sacrificed themselves to prevent
further death and destruction. We shed our tears in a common bond of grief for those
we loved and lost. We journeyed through a dark valley, but your light has led us to
a place of hope. You have turned our grief into determination. We are resolved to do
what is good, and right, and just. Help us to remember what it means to be Americans
a people endowed with abundant blessings. Help us to cherish the freedoms we enjoy
and inspire us to stand with courage, united as one Nation in the midst of any
adversity. Lord, hear this prayer for our Nation. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ . Amen.
Keep the families of 9/11 in your thoughts and prayers.
What a sad day that will live in our lives forever.
I was not going to comment on it, but i'm getting sick of all the whining going on. We are looking like a bunch of sissy. The President had no problem saying the mosque should be built because we tolerate religious freedoms. Then gets on the air and whines about what this man in Fla wants to do with his religious freedom. We are looking like a bunch of weak punks to the world. Look at the flag below, it is ok for them to burn the flag and in Muslim countries they ban and burn churches and bibles, put people in jail. Christians in Gaza Fear for Their Lives as Muslims Burn Bibles and Destroy Crosses http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/285123/christians_in_gaza_fear_for_their_lives.html
Our own military burned bibles recently (http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/20/us.military.bibles.burned/) No outcry over that, but burn a Koran and it becomes an issue. Just shut up. I hope no one gets hurt from this, but if someone does get hurt, it has nothing to do with the man in Fla, but the people that did it, they are the animals.
And it has started
Thousands of Afghans protest Quran-burning plan... (2007)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6891AM20100910
John Quincy Adams writes about islam
Jim Kelly
"In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar (mohammed), the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth.
Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent god; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle.
Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion.
He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind.
THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE...
Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged.
The war is yet flagrant...While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon the earth, and good will towards men"
John Quincy Adams
Sixth President of The United States of America
1830
http://worth-reading-blog.blogspot.com/2010/08/john-quincy-adams.html
Airport `Naked Image' Scanners May Get Privacy Upgrades
Holli Powell, a Phoenix medical- software consultant who flies every week, says she avoids getting into airport security lines that end at what she calls a humiliating full-body scanner.
“Those scanners, I feel, are above and beyond,” Powell, 35, said in an interview. They generate “nearly naked images.”
The concerns of travelers such as Powell, which led privacy advocates to sue the government, may soon be eased. L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. and OSI Systems Inc.’s Rapiscan, makers of the scanners for U.S. airports, are delivering software upgrades that show a generic figure rather than an actual image of a passenger’s body parts. The new display would mark sections of a person’s body that need to be checked.
The revisions “certainly address most of the privacy concerns,” Peter Kant, a Rapiscan executive vice president, said in an interview. Every passenger will generate an avatar that “looks like a guy wearing a baseball cap,” he said.
The Transportation Security Administration aims to add the software to the machines, which sparked complaints, as more airports get the scanners. As of Aug. 27, 194 of the devices were in use at 51 U.S. airports, an almost fivefold increase from six months ago,
“TSA continues to explore additional privacy protections for imaging technology,” Greg Soule, a spokesman for the security agency, said in an e-mail. “Testing is currently under way.”
The agency is accelerating use of the scanners after the U.S. said Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on approach to Detroit Dec. 25 by igniting explosives in his underpants. The 1,000 scanners due at airports by the end of next year will put the devices at more than half the security lanes at major U.S. airports.
28 Airports
The 28 airports getting scanners in the second half of this year include New York’s Kennedy and Philadelphia, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Houston, Miami, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Seattle, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in July.
New York-based L-3, which already has one of its revised scanners in use at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, presented its upgrade to the U.S. security agency Aug. 31, and the technology is now being reviewed in a federal laboratory, according to the company.
“We look forward to a successful trial and certification process with the TSA this fall,” Bill Frain, an L-3 senior vice president for government sales, said in a statement.
OSI’s Rapiscan, based in Torrance, California, plans to present software for its machines this month, Kant said. The software change will be tested by the agency, he said.
302 Scanners
L-3 and Rapiscan shared a $47.9 million contract in April for 302 of the scanners. L-3 will get $31.7 million to build 202 machines and Rapiscan $16.2 million for 100. The funds were to come from last year’s $814 billion stimulus law.
The software changes are “a pretty substantial development” for the companies and “something that TSA has wanted,” said Jeffrey Sural, an attorney for Alston & Bird LLP in Washington and a former assistant administrator at the security agency. “There’s still a long way to go,” and months will be spent testing the technology, he said.
Using full-body imaging technology is voluntary, though passengers who refuse to be scanned may be frisked by U.S. security employees. The agency said data show when passengers were offered the choice of the scanner or alternate screening such as a pat-down, more than 98 percent chose scanners.
Separate Room
Machines now at airports are monitored by a TSA employee in a separate room, to prevent passengers and security workers at the checkpoint from viewing the full-body image that sees through undergarments. The software upgrade would replace the images with an avatar and alert authorities to a potential hidden threat, eliminating the need to keep an employee in a remote room.
The upgrade “really reduces the personnel costs,” Rapiscan’s Kant said. The Government Accountability Office estimated in March that agency staffing costs could climb $2.4 billion over seven years from expanded use of scanners, assuming current staffing requirements.
Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group that sued the agency in July over the devices, said revising the machine software “makes a lot of sense” from an engineering standpoint.
The upgrades don’t resolve privacy questions, said Rotenberg, whose Washington-based group objects to the use of the devices as a primary screening tool. The agency may someday decide it wanted to record passenger images or link scan results to traveler names, he said.
“Over time there’s every reason to believe TSA would want to know the identities of passengers, because it would make threat detection more informed,” Rotenberg said.
Powell said she will continue to allow extra time before her flights to find the line that won’t force her to walk through the body scanners, even if they are upgraded. The devices are still capable of transmitting and storing images, she said, and that “is scary.”
The enemies amoung us is a real concern, we have those with in our own military that are killing their own. There are numerous examples of homegrown terrorists in the US, the Fort Dix six and here is the latest eample of it in Canada.
'Canadian Idol' contestant: Model of new terrorist
WASHINGTON - On June 9, 2008, judges of television's "Canadian Idol" snickered as a young Muslim man offered to do his rendition of Canadian pop singer Avril Lavigne's "Complicated."
Stepping onto the stage dressed in garb that resembled a mix of traditional Afghan and Pakistani clothing, Khurram Syed Sher calmly and confidently answered the preliminary questions from judge Farley Flex.
What happened next, as evidenced by the baffled expressions on the judges' faces, was a highly amusing combination of half-hearted dance moves and singing that reduced the panel into a state of pure hilarity.
After the performance, Judge Sass Jordan, visibly stunned by the act, asked, "Have you ever thought of being a comedian?"
Sher comically responded, "No, I like hockey and acting."
A little more than a year later, Canadian authorities discovered that's indeed what he was doing - acting.
Canada's Royal Canadian Mounted Police suspected Sher of plotting a terrorist attack in Ottawa, the country's capital.
Sher was arrested in August along with three other men and charged with conspiring to facilitate terrorism with others in Canada, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Dubai over the past two years.
When the RCMP investigation began in September 2009, Sher was 27. Having completed a pathology residency at McGill University, he had just become a doctor.
Sher, the father of three young children, grew up in Montreal. He was well known for the outgoing, charming style that he generously poured on the "Canadian Idol" judges and humanitarian causes.
Canadian and U.S. authorities point to his arrest as another example of terrorist recruits born and bred in a community that have no known connection to terrorist organizations and turn out to be plotting attacks.
The arrest a primary reason why authorities are broadening their criteria for who and what are determined as suspicious.
"You can't simply rely on patterns to catch people. But there are choke points through which most recruits attracted by al-Qaida and its allies pass. One is the Internet and the other is the physical facilities overseas at which these groups train people. Those aren't your only focus, but you have to pay attention to them," says a U.S. counterterrorism official.
It was an overseas connection in part that attracted the attention of the RCMP, similar to the case of Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the attempted bombing in New York's Times Square in May.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents stopped Shahzad from leaving the U.S. on an Emirates Air flight leaving JFK airport in New York. Commissioner Alan Bersin says creative thinking and acting is what led to Shahzad's arrest.
"It's absolutely critical - in order to respond to an event effectively - that we are looking at the threat stream and the risk that faces us," Bersin says.
"If you work smartly against those targets -- if you know how the terrorists communicate and where they prepare their operatives -- you improve your chances of disrupting them before they strike," the counterterrorism source says.
"The work is tough, painstaking and at times very dangerous. But it's one part of what we have to do to try to stop these people."
http://wtop.com/?nid=25&sid=2048924
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