Look who’s checking our bags

17 July 2005: “I’ve been screening your bags for the past six months, and you don’t even know it.”

Nice. Those are the words of Bassam Khalaf, 21, pictured above, who worked as a baggage screener at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas from January 16, 2005 until he was terminated on July 7, 2005. Oh, the irony.

Khalaf is of Palestinian descent but was born in Houston. He is also a self-admitted “Arabic Assassin” who supports Islamic Terrorism against America, according to his hip-hop song lyrics. His unreleased CD “Terror Alert” contains lyrics about flying a plane into a building and descriptions of himself as a “crazy, suicidal Arabic . . . equipped with bombs.” And if that’s not enough, he sings in praise the raping, torturing, and murdering of Christians and Blacks, and forcing everyone to perform oral sex on him. He is anti-Semitic and supports violence against women and necrophilia. And he speaks of a plane flying into a building on 9/11/05. He was hired by the Transportation Security Administration because he had no criminal record. According to Andrea McCauley, a spokeswoman for the regional Transportation Security Administration office in Dallas, the “TSA checks criminal records before hiring screeners, but it does not investigate what people do in their spare time.” How much effort does it take to insert an applicant’s name into an Internet search engine? But I digress.

A simple Internet search by name would have provided a treasure trove of background information about Khalaf and avoided the embarrassing situation of allowing a “Arabic Assassin” to work in a position of security at an airport named after a U.S. president. Obviously, Internet searches are not involved in the screening process. You can bet there are more “Bassam Khalafs” working in sensitive positions in this country because of incomplete and insufficient background investigations and incompetant investigators. We are no safer than we were on September 10, 2001.

Columnist Debbie Schlussel writes about this incident as well as former Detroit screener Sadeq Naji Ahmed, a TSA screener in Detroit, who was dismissed from the Air Force for praising Bin Laden, the 9/11 attacks, and future attacks on America, but then hired by the TSA to screen bags at Metro Detroit Airport. To understand the insanity involved in the system, visit Ms. Schlussel’s web site. Meanwhile, know that the TSA has everything under control.

The above information is at the Northeast Intelligence Network, information obtained and written by Doug Hagmann. ©Copyright Doug Hagmann, Northeast Intelligence Network. Permission for reposting is granted provided the author and the Northeast Intelligence Network are properly cited.

Thanks go out to Mudville, and Outside the Beltway

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