9/11

Debra Burlingame about Sen. Obama’s “invade Pakistan” speech

Debra Burlingame spoke with syndicated talk-radio host Mark Levin this evening, leading off about Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s “illconsidered” speech where he suggested that the United States should invade Pakistan. In addition, she spoke of the Democratic Party’s deliberate undermining of our national defense and efforts in Iraq:

“I think there are people on the Hill who know perfectly well how strategically important Iraq is in this terrible war that we’re facing. But I think its politics. I think they have to beat down this President — and they started very quickly after 9/11 — to gain power back and they’re willing to put Americans and this country in danger to do it. I think that there are others who are naive, who believe what their advisers on the extreme left tell them. Maybe they’ve made a bargain with the devil, I don’t know, but it is a sad day when a Congressman of this United States says that a victory for the U.S. military is a bad thing for the Democrats.”

Here is the full interview:

Editor — Debra Burlingame is the sister of Charles Burlingame III, who was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 77 that terrorists hijacked and then crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. She is also a former lawyer, a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, and a co-founder of 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America.

It’s a pre-9/11 Congress

James Jay Carafano’s view of the ‘9/11 bill,’ this morning, in the National Review Online:

Those hoping the bill would provide a clear strategic direction for homeland-security policy will find this “signature” as inscrutable as that of a drunken doctor writing in haste. But the bill does clearly show, however, that the way Congress “does” homeland security has changed significantly under it new Democratic leadership.

One measure of how far the bill has missed its strategic mark is how found in how very few of its more than 700 pages of provisions pertains in any way to recommendations actually made by the 9/11 Commission. Inspecting every container of frozen fish, for example, was never suggested in the commission report.

How curious that the so-called 9/11 bill can come up with so many frothy original ideas, yet scrupulously avoid so many hard-nosed recommendations from the commission. For instance, whatever happened to the idea of further consolidating the jurisdiction of congressional committees over the Homeland Security Department. The new law studiously ignores this basic housekeeping reform so strenuously sought by the commission.