From KTVI in St. Louis:

A witness on board a flight from St. Louis to Dulles Airport in Washington says two men who were originally thought to be behaving oddly on a plane at Lambert Airport Sunday night were indeed federal air marshals.

Ron Meyer says he was a passenger on board United flight #3681 Sunday evening. He says, originally, a flight attendant told the passengers the men were claiming to be air marshals but did not have any identification. However, according to Meyer, a pilot later said the men were indeed federal marshals. All passengers were taken off the flight and re-screened at the request of the pilot.

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As a first responder paramedic and survivor of the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center,  the tenth anniversary has brought for me an unsettling feeling of fear that was unexpected. A fear that is not based on the threat of another terror attack but rather the realization that 9/11 is being successfully erased from our collective consciousness and memories.

The threat of new terror attacks is not only real, but has changed from a possibility to an absolute certainty. The politicization of our homeland and national security has guaranteed a second 9/11 style attack or worse. The lessons that I hoped were learned post 9/11 were quickly forgotten, ignored  and replaced with a homeland security strategy that targets political opponents.  The highly charged political environment has corroded many of our capabilities and defenses, making every man, woman and child the next potential terrorist casualty.

While the physical threats are real, the greater threat we face is a country that has lost its guiding principles and values. A country that glamorizes reality show personalities and forgets the blood and treasure of its fallen guardians… minimizes their memories and sacrifice.   The media and politicians have hijacked 9/11 as a political pawn in an attempt to rewrite history, simply to fulfill a narrative that fits each of their own personal agendas.

The consequence in forgetting 9/11 is that we will be forced to  forget the most successful rescue effort in history.

It wasn’t politicians that ran up the stairwells of burning skyscrapers, or took control of hijacked planes, or used their bodies as shields to protect a stranger. It was a cop, a firefighter, a medic, a flight attendant, a locksmith, an iron worker, who said ….”you go home today, I won’t let any harm come to you.” They said this as they gave their lives to fulfill that promise.

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Looking back over the last 10 years and thinking about where many of us were and how we felt when the towers fell is surreal. These are sad thoughts. But what I find even more saddening is the fact that we have allowed our country to become more and more of a police state over the last 10 years. And apparently, the end is not in site…and will likely only become worse.

When the Department of Homeland Security was launched after 9/11 and the Patriot Act was launched as a bill that would last only 4 years, many freedom loving Americans squabbled. Most turned to those rebels and told them to “shut up,” that it was necessary to protect America. Then we allowed the TSA to militarize our airports and treat us like cattle. Then came the unsecured and blatant violation of personal privacy when travelers data was being collected. And of course the full body pat downs of children and colonoscopies full-body scans.

Oh, but a little before the whole body scan debacle was of course the hush-hush hiring of Ex-Stasi Spy Markus Wolf by the DHS. Who better to know how to teach the government how to spy on its own citizens and invoke citizen to citizen tattle telling than an ex-East German communist?

Is it any surprise that in the years following Wolf’s tenure as a consultant to DHS prior to his death we have now seen programs develop out of DHS that include the government asking its citizens to report on their neighbors, and the institution of a secret police force called “Viper Team”. It’s rumored they great each other with a hearty, “Shield and sword!”

Don’t forget the vans with X-ray patrolling our streets as well…

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Obama, the current  “problem” all Americans are forced to “live with,” felt it was as good a time as any to hang in a hallway outside the Oval Office Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With” – a canvas that revives hurt rather than cultivates healing.

The President’s taste in artwork indicates that America’s “post-racial president” may be secretly nursing a deep-seated wound.  It’s either that, or he’s uninterested in fostering unity. If that weren’t a distinct possibility, why didn’t he choose Norman Rockwell’s “Murder in Mississippi (Southern Justice),” which portrays the deaths of three civil rights workers, two of whom where white, killed for their efforts to register African American voters, or “Negro in the Suburbs,” which depicts black children interacting with the white children in their new neighborhood?

Mr. Obama could have requested any painting, but he chose the one that depicts “U.S. marshals escorting Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old African-American girl, into a New Orleans elementary school in 1960 as court-ordered integration met with an angry and defiant response from the white community.”

The thrust of the painting is not subtle. America’s vilest racial epithet appears in letters several inches high at the top of the canvas. To the left side, the letters “KKK” are plainly visible. The crowds, mostly women who gathered daily to taunt Bridges as she went to a largely empty school, are not shown in the picture. But the racist graffiti and a splattered tomato convey the hostile atmosphere.

Rather than displaying a reminder of division and hatred, shouldn’t America’s first black president be focusing on the harmony that the historic nature of his presidency promised to deliver?  Instead, his attraction to an artist’s rendition of one of the “ugliest racial episodes in U.S. history” indicates that the President of the United States may harbor a measure of latent acrimony.

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From Politico:

From the time he launched his campaign for president three years ago, Barack Obama had to consider how he would react to the first serious act of terrorism during the campaign, or if he won, on his watch. His fellow Democrats had been thinking about the moment even longer – since the September day in 2001 when attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon defined George W. Bush’s presidency and gave Republicans a decisive advantage on a defining political issue.

And yet the White House’s response to last week’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit could rank as one of the low points of the new president’s first year. Over the course of five days, Obama’s Obama’ reaction ranged from low-keyed to reassuring to, finally, a vow to find out what went wrong. The episode was a baffling, unforced error in presidential symbolism, hardly a small part of the presidency, and the moment at which yet another of the old political maxims that Obama had sought to transcend – the Democrats’ vulnerability on national security – reasserted itself.

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As the president wraps up his swing across all of the talk shows and collects his Nobel Peace Prize, one gets the sense that we are rapidly approaching a defining moment in the Obama presidency. 9-11 was thrust upon President Bush just nine months into his administration, and President Obama now faces an unwelcome, but completely predictable, dilemma in his first year. The key issue of course is whether the President should resource the McChrsytal strategy or does he listen to his base and deny his general on the ground the troops he believes are needed to win?

When Obama came into office there were 35,000 troops in Afghanistan. Soon there will be 68,000, meaning Obama ordered 33,000 of them into combat. Just 3,000 more and Obama owns the balance.

Even if he doesn’t send the additional 40,000 troops General McChrystal asked for, there’s no doubt that this is his war now. The president may be looking at this the way a relief pitcher views the situation coming into an inning with runners on base. What counts against him and what doesn’t? But as commander in chief, he has to unhinge himself from such personal considerations. He must take off his political hat and listen to the sound advice of his military commanders and the Secretary of Defense. (more…)