The Fox guarding the Henhouse.

[FormerRepublican]

"Lockheed Martin Corp. was awarded a $212 million contract to build a counter-terrorist surveillance and security system for New York's subways and commuter railroads as well as bridges and tunnels.

The Bethesda defense contractor's system is expected to include more than 1,000 cameras and 3,000 electronic sensors, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The MTA carries an average of 7.7 million weekday riders, the most in the United States. The Lockheed contract is the largest spending commitment so far by the agency to strengthen its defenses against terrorism.

"We will be on the cutting edge of this technology in order to protect our system against terrorist attack," said Katherine N. Lapp, the authority's executive director. Lockheed's proposed system "doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, in any other transit agency," she said."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/23/AR2005082301488.html

Considering the fact that a VP for Lockheed was PNAC Chairman (and we KNOW what those guys have been doing to get us to invade Iraq), New York should worry:

"The "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" is setting up offices on Capitol Hill this week, according to its president, Randy Scheunemann, Lott's former chief national-security adviser who last year worked in Rumsfeld's office as a consultant on Iraq policy. The chairman of the new Committee, Bruce P. Jackson, is a former vice president of Lockheed Martin who chaired the Republican Party Platform's subcommittee for National Security and Foreign Policy when Bush ran for president in 2000.

Jackson, who also served as chairman of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, which spearheaded a "citizen's" campaign to persuade Congress to ratify NATO's eastward expansion in 1998, resigned from Lockheed earlier this year to, in his words, "pursue democracy building projects full-time."

He, Scheunemann, and a prominent Republican fund-raiser who worked with Jackson on the NATO Committee, Julie Finley, founded the Project on Transitional Democracies, for which he is now president. He also leads the U.S. Committee on NATO, a successor to the expansion effort, in which both Scheunemann and Finley are officers.

The new Committee on Iraq appears to be a spin-off from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a front group consisting mainly of neoconservative Jews and heavy-hitters from the Christian Right whose public recommendations on fighting President George W. Bush's "war against terrorism" and alignment with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the second intifada have anticipated to a remarkable degree the administration's policy course.

Both Scheunemann and Jackson have signed a number of PNAC's open letters to Bush, including one sent just eight days after the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, calling for Washington to carry the anti-terrorist campaign beyond al Qaeda to Syria, Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Palestine Authority and, of course, Iraq.

Other signers included Richard Perle, chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB), Frank Gaffney, a Perle protege who now heads the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and several of Perle's colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), including former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Ledeen, and Marc Reuel Gerecht.

Gary Schmitt, PNAC's executive director, has agreed to join Jackson, Finley, and Scheunemann, as an officer in the new Iraq group."

http://presentdanger.irc-online.org/papers/libiraq_body.html

I wonder. Is the security system designed to prevent terrorist attacks, or help them along when the PNACers need a 'pearl harbor type incident.'

:scared: