- Works in national security
- Attends classified meetings on Capitol Hill
- Spends hours writing essay-length posts sycophantically defending the Vikings from any and all criticism on an obscure internet message board about development in a city he purports to live 900 miles away from
(One of these things is not like the others.)
I personally know one guy that could easily fit all those with criteria whom I grew up with in the northern 'burbs. Perhaps VFIM is him. Believe it or not, people who work in national security and go to classified meetings on capital hill are not created in a special factory and sequestered away from all contact with the public when not working on top secret stuff. They actually are a lot like everybody else!
I don’t sycophantically defend the Wilfs, I think they did what they had to do to keep pro-football in Minnesota and think the unbalanced attacks on them ooze provincial anti-Semitism. At this time, I think the Vikings are the only professional sports franchise in Minnesota actually committed to being a top-tier competitive team in their league. The Wilfs played hardball and they won – boo hoo. They also put up a ton of their own money, are the singular reason why Downtown East emerged from urban purgatory (no team, no public funding), and made the City of Minneapolis and the State of Minnesota better for it. I’m not sure if it's the whininess or petty vindictive venalness that is worse. If you lost that one, chalk it up, grow a pair, and move on.
Living in the DC area where Government is the industry, being on Capitol Hill is what happens here – nobody kisses your ring when meeting with members and committees; most complain when having to go there because there is truly no parking. Me and literally thousands of others in this city do what I noted earlier on a daily basis. There are a lot of people from Minnesota who work in the national security and counter-terror establishments here in Washington, DC, they often spend Sundays, when they can, watching the Vikings at home, at sports bars, and even at some taverns known for favoring the Vikings. I lived in Minnesota, my wife is from Minnesota, and my children were born there. I graduated from the U of Minnesota and went to law school there. My father was heavily involved in urban development in both a governmental and non-Governmental capacity in St. Paul and Minneapolis. He was VP of one of the major construction firms there.
“(One of these things is not like the others.)” Only to a provincial yokel who thinks the State Fair is living large, and was born, lived, and died within 20 miles of a central point would write a comment that revealed such a self-referencing narrowness (and be surprised when someone laughs at it). I’ve been to Viking game get-togethers in Moscow, Warsaw (Poland not Wisconsin), Frankfurt, Delhi, Cairo, Singapore, Tokyo and Doha. I watched Randy Moss’s “welcome to the NFL” game against Green Bay in the very early hours in Gugerat, India in the late 1990s. I watched the North Stars in the Stanley Cups in a bar in Prague (not pronounce like New Prague) in 1991. I may be in the Marriott in Warsaw this fall for a game. Is your idea of being from Minnesota and having an international background that you ate at the International House of Pancakes?
While I do not work for the government today, and never held a GS status, I was at times very heavily involved in counter-terror activities both here and abroad both in a government and consulting capacity. I just returned from Cairo. My familiarity with the subject matter keeps me here as I became an expert - through no fault of my own - in certain aspects of the subject matter, but count the days when I can pull out of the DC area (I also feel it necessary to wait for my daughter to graduate high school). I’ve said nothing that is speculative in the context of open spaces in urban areas regarding counter-terror measures.
As the context makes clear, the counter-terror community I was referring to was the FBI, DHS, and the NCTC. As far as I know, most of them have the same apolitical/low, bipartisan loathing of both parties regardless of what their affinities may have been before coming in. I did not discuss any classified information and did not compromise otherwise “law enforcement sensitive but unclassified” information. Not much classified goes on – on Capitol Hill. Classified stuff take place somewhere else (and there are a lot of “somewhere else” around here).
I did not know that Judicial Watch also submitted requests. To my knowledge, the FOIA activity has not played itself out; its usually a two year process leading to court action. The blast site was demolished before a forensic exam could be done; the explosion of Cedar Riverside is among those “mystery” events that continues to make the PowerPoint briefings of questionable “WFT just happened there” events among professionals in the CT community.
The Somali Community in Minnesota has a high al-Shabab presence (as suggested by another on this list, your local JTTF is hyper-aware of it); Somali delegations making the DC diplomatic rounds in DC routinely complain of terrorists entering their country who transit from Minnesota.
MPLSJAROMIR, aside from the sheer ignorance of your comments, do you have spittle emitting from your mouth when saying them. Your comments don’t begin to frame who I am but they sure say a lot about you. Things are heating up on the domestic front wrt to terrorism and the domestic CT / LE know it. Just ask your local JTTF folks. If you don't know what a JTTF is, stay on the porch.
As my only intention was to explain why such ugly temporary fencing can be thrown up alongside otherwise well designed buildings owing to threat postures, and as this is not the forum to weigh the pros and cons of the war on terror (or whatever else you want to call it), I will suspend my end of this discussion. I come to this "obscure Internet message board" because I love urban design, very much like Minneapolis, and keep track of what is going on there to take my mind off of what is going on here. Lately, however, I've also taken to watching Japanese movies of the Criterion Collection on Hulu. Tonight, its
Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo!