Last week, I wrote that the Todd Palin's ties to Alaskan secessionists could raise security concerns.
A common negative response to my posting asserts, "Oh, yeah? Obama would NEVER be allowed to have a clearance. He was associated with Bill Ayers and/or Reverend Wright and/or Frank Marshall Davis and/or communists and/or Chicago real estate crooks." Apparently, this meme was given life by a chain email in circulation over the past month or so, supposedly originating from an FBI veteran. Yeah, the FBI--you know, the guys who gave a clearance to Robert Hanssen, the most damaging, traitorous spy in US history.
Like most chain emails--it's wrong.
I'm not even sure how Barack Obama's Ayers or Wright connections would even be reported to security clearance investigators--there's not a blank space on the SF 86 security form for "tenuous or fleeting connections to people that are disliked by conservatives." There's not even a place on the form for religion or congregation. Investigators who might develop information about Obama's connection to Ayers or Wright would be focused on whether or not they were ever roommates or if they ever jointly filed bankruptcy. Investigators would have no trouble figuring out that Obama merely was acquainted with Ayers (Wright wouldn't even be interesting enough for investigative follow up), and not a fellow member of the Weather Underground.
Don't take my word for it. Expert sources--specifically, attorneys specializing in national security law--explained in the St. Petersburg Times that the Obamas' acquaintance and association with Ayers, Wright, and Davis simply are not relevant or substantive enough to impact Barack Obama's security suitability.
Obama's detractors don't understand how the security clearance process works if they think that merely knowing or doing business with a felon, former terrorist, or conservative boogeyman renders all who do so as ineligible for a clearance. Similar ignorance of the clearance process is evidenced by claims that membership in the cranky Rev. Wright's "anti-American" congregation is or should be a problem from a security perspective. This is America, after all--intelligence and military security investigators do not screen or vet churches, synagogues, or bowling leagues to ensure that they are "pro-American" enough for their security clearance-holding members.
Even the conservative characterization of Bill Ayers vastly inflates the relevance and impact of the once-violent Ayers and the Weather Underground terrorist group. The more breathless accounts posit Ayers as some kind of terrorist mastermind with an uncanny ability to transform anybody he meets or shares committee assignments with into a subversive American-hating militant, and who very nearly toppled American civilization as we know it.
In reality, Ayers and his WU pals had little effect on American society and policy. As a terrorist group, WU was singularly ineffective--the FBI easily penetrated and disrupted WU, and most of the group's leadership were killed when a bomb they were making inadvertently detonated and destroyed their New York City hideout. Indeed, the terror part of homebrewed US left wing terrorism has always lagged behind the comparatively bloody effectiveness of homebrewed right wing terrorism. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Olympics/Women's Clinic bomber Eric Robert Rudolph probably killed more of their fellow citizens in the 1990s than Ayers and all of his 20th century lefty fellow travelers combined.
That's the McVeigh and Rudolph who, by the way, trace their violent politics back to the same ideological swamp of anti-government sentiment, gun rights zealotry, and extreme social conservatism that the militia movement comes from. You know, the militia movement that has so much in common with that Alaska Independence Party that loves Sarah and Todd Palin so much.