Venturing further into the esoteric, Mary Queen of Scots reigned from 1542 to 1567 and many accounts indicate that she made important decisions based on her tarot readings.

Moving on to a time where superstition was both the last thing to base decisions on and the only source of hopes, both sides of WWII had documented beliefs in superstition. Winston Churchill surrounded himself with cats that allegedly brought him good luck while he battled the apparent dark influences of the number 13, Friday and travel in general. Similarly across the Atlantic, President Roosevelt hated travelling along with Fridays and the number 13. One wonders how the two Allies met so often considering the restrictions (and we have records) of both men whom ‘could not’ travel or do much of anything on Fridays or at times that had anything to do with the number 13. Like Napoleon, FDR would go so far as to have his secretary on call as a fourteenth in case he was one of thirteen dinner guests around a table. On the Axis side of things, Hitler was terrified of cats and had them banned from all Nazi installations. His quest for the occult, including the search for the spear of destiny said to have pierced the side of Jesus Christ, became legendary but did not do much to help him in the end. I’m starting to see an unexpected pattern that cats are key to victory.

Keeping with America, the long tradition of democracy and transparency explains why we have so many documented superstitions for US presidents. Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) believed in his dreams as visions and legend has it that he witnessed his own assassination days before it happened. He would go so far as to announce positive news about Civil War battles before messengers arrived because he had already ‘seen’ the good omens. The very superstitious Lincoln lives on today; it is said that he haunts a wing of the White House and roams the halls at night.

President McKinley (1897-1901) wore his lucky red carnation at all times on his lapel. He would frequently give the carnation to people he met to bestow the good luck unto them but had to drop everything afterwards in order to get another one. It was (probably) a coincidence that in Buffalo during the Pan-American expo, he gave his carnation to a young girl and was then promptly shot. He died eight days later convinced the lack of a carnation was to blame.

Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) was positive he saw a UFO and proudly said so during his political campaign. He even promised to declassify all documents pertaining to extraterrestrial activity were he ever elected president. Speculation has it that he simply saw a particularly bright planet Venus but the man was convinced. Election seemed to have changed his mind as he never spoke of the matter again. On the other hand, he never declassified anything on extraterrestrial life so the possibilities are that there was nothing or something to hide…

Finally we have the granddaddy of all superstitious world leaders as recorded by history. Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). His wife Nancy consulted sporadically with an astrologer, a common thing following the more esoteric times of the 60s and 70s. What was definitely uncommon was that President Reagan came to rely on the astrologer, one Joan Quigley, for executive decisions. The president was reportedly trying to avoid a curse that saw the death or assassination while in office of all US presidents elected in 1840, 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940 and 1960. Following John Hinckley’s assassination attempt on Reagan in May of 1981, Mrs. Quigley became (by many accounts) the second most important person in the country after the President. Reagan’s former chief of staff even went on to confirm that the President’s schedule had to be routinely confirmed with the astrologer for final approval. In effect, when protestors in the eighties proclaimed that the White House wasn’t listening, they had no idea…

In conclusion, President Ahmadinejad accuses the wrong Western leaders of superstition and gives way too much credit to Paul the Octopus. With varying degrees, from President Truman’s lucky horseshoe in the Oval Office to President’s Reagan’s executive seer, superstition has been taking out the punch out of democracy for centuries now. We believe these leaders represent the people but they might just as well rely on the stars, their phobias and their gut feelings to lead a country. All in all, I agree with the Iranian President that superstitions are a bad thing for world leaders but whereas he and I see these things as ridiculous, frivolous and downright insulting at times, that is only because we do not believe in them. The same argument and logic could apply to religious beliefs but that is a topic for another blog.

[Joseph A. Palermo is Associate Professor of American History at California State University, Sacramento.]

"Always Be Closing" is the slogan of"Premiere Properties," the fictional Chicago real estate office in David Mamet's play, Glengarry Glen Ross."Always Be Closing" is not only the theme of Mamet's examination of the tyranny of the"bottom line" over human relationships, but also appears to be the driving principle behind the"University" of Phoenix's administrators who crafted guidelines for their enrollment officers. So cynical are Phoenix's instructions to its underlings they might even defy Mamet's imagination. The goal is simple: rope in as many unsuspecting students as possible into as much bankruptcy-proof financial debt as possible:

Creating Urgency:

Getting Them to Apply NOW

Remember. . . .

*Students don't buy benefits

*They buy to ease or avoid pain

*Finding and burrowing into that pain moves the sale to a CLOSE

*Also, the close of the sale is really just a beginning

Any institution that calls itself a"university" yet tells its enrollment officers to"burrow" down deep into the"pain" of its students with the aim of hooking them into government-subsidized debt to rake in the profits not only doesn't deserve to be accredited, but should be barred from having any access to federal student aid programs.

It turns out that if a for-profit" college" can" close" the sale (enrollment) of a student who only stays in school for a couple of weeks it gets to pocket a big share of that student's federal aid. Pretty Sweet, Uh?

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa is right now trying to change this unsatisfactory situation. In the last 10 years enrollment in these for-profit diploma mills, which have their hands deep inside the till of federal student aid programs, grew from 600,000 to two million students. The federal financial aid to students at the for-profit"universities" has gone from $4.6 billion in 2000 to more than $23 billion in 2010. And the"University" of Phoenix and other"for-profits" won't even release their dropout rate numbers!

When the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under George Kutz recently sent out"secret shoppers" to enroll in the"University" of Phoenix, and other for-profit" colleges," it found that 100 percent of the time -- in fifteen out of fifteen cases, (and all caught on video tape!) -- the enrollment officials followed the"Always Be Closing" guidelines. Fifteen out of fifteen times they refused to answer students' basic questions, denied them the opportunity to speak with a financial aid counselor, and even refused to provide them with information about the size of the loan they were about to sign and the timetable for repayment.

The incentives are all wrong. Instead of being there to help students receive an education at an affordable cost to better prepare them to join the workforce, these"for-profits" are employing the most egregious money-grubbing tactics to bilk their students and the federal government. How's that for an Alma Mater? Senator Harkin and the GAO's work has exposed once and for all how utterly corrupt these for-profit"universities" and" colleges" really are.

At a time when the faculties of public colleges and universities are being told by their administrators how they should imitate the for-profits like the"University" of Phoenix because they represent some sort of idealized"private sector" efficiency model Senator Harkin's and the GAO's revelations are all the more stunning. In California, the community college brass recently tried to ram through a transfer of credit deal with Kaplan as a way to stretch its budget. Luckily, the faculty senate refused to go along. Harkin and the GAO have just driven a stake in the heart of the monster that insists on privatizing public colleges and universities.

The"University" of Phoenix, which is owned by something called"the Apollo Group," (probably named after the moon landing because its profits are astronomical), has resisted providing documents to Harkin's committee, the most important body in the federal government dealing with education. And where is Arne Duncan our vaunted Secretary of Education? Too busy privatizing public K through 12 schools to be bothered with reining in the for-profits that are ripping off America's college students.

The only"student learning outcomes" these for-profit corporations posing as colleges recognize are those that fill their own pockets with tax dollars that are supposed to be going to deserving students who just want an education.

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has just been published.]

Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week.  He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site."Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.” 

Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who in school civics texts of my childhood always seemed to land on Main Street, U.S.A., to survey the wonders of our American system), you might be a bit taken aback by Mullen’s statement.  After all, one of the revelations in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was already on American hands. 

The British Guardian was one of three publications given early access to the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes...”  Or as the paper added in a piece headlined “Secret CIA paramilitaries’ role in civilian deaths”: “Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called ‘blue on white’ events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.”  Or as it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373, an “undisclosed ‘black’ unit” of U.S. special operations forces focused on assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda “senior officials”: “The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women, and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”

Admittedly, the events recorded in the Wikileaks archive took place between 2004 and the end of 2009, and so don’t cover the last six months of the Obama administration’s across-the-board surge in Afghanistan.  Then again, Admiral Mullen became chairman of the Joint Chiefs in October 2007, and so has been at the helm of the American war machine for more than two of the years in question.

He was, for example, chairman in July 2008, when an American plane or planes took out an Afghan bridal party -- 70 to 90 strong and made up mostly of women -- on a road near the Pakistani border.  They were"escorting the bride to meet her groom as local tradition dictates." The bride, whose name we don’t know, died, as did at least 27 other members of the party, including children.  Mullen was similarly chairman in August 2008 when a memorial service for a tribal leader in the village of Azizabad in Afghanistan’s Herat Province was hit by repeated U.S. air strikes that killed at least 90 civilians, including perhaps 15 women and up to 60 children. Among the dead were 76 members of one extended family, headed by Reza Khan, a"wealthy businessman with construction and security contracts with the nearby American base at Shindand airport."

Mullen was still chairman in April 2009 when members of the family of Awal Khan, an Afghan army artillery commander on duty elsewhere, were killed in a U.S.-led raid in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan.  Among them were his"schoolteacher wife, a 17-year-old daughter named Nadia, a 15-year-old son, Aimal, and his brother, employed by a government department.” Another daughter was wounded and the pregnant wife of Khan's cousin was shot five times in the abdomen. 

Mullen remained chairman when, in November 2009, two relatives of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture, were shot down in cold blood in Ghazni City in a Special Operations night raid; as he was -- and here we move beyond the Wikileaks time frame -- when, in February 2010, U.S. Special Forces troops in helicopters struck a convoy of mini-buses, killing up to 27 civilians, including women and children; as he also was when, in that same month, in a special operations night raid, two pregnant women and a teenage girl, as well as a police officer and his brother, were shot to death in their home in a village near Gardez, the capital of Paktia province.  After which, the soldiers reportedly dug the bullets out of the bodies, washed the wounds with alcohol, and tried to cover the incident up.  He was no less chairman late last month when residents of a small town in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan claimed that a NATO missile attack had killed 52 civilians, an incident that, like just about every other one mentioned above and so many more, was initially denied by U.S. and NATO spokespeople and is now being “investigated.” 

And this represents only a grim, minimalist highlight reel among rafts of such incidents, including enough repeated killings or woundings of innocent civilians at checkpoints that previous Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal commented: “We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”  In other words, if your basic Martian visitor were to take the concept of command responsibility at all seriously, he might reasonably weigh actual blood (those hundreds of unreported civilian casualties of the American war the Guardian highlighted, for example) against prospective blood (possible Afghan informers killed by the Taliban via names combed from the Wikileaks documents) and arrive at quite a different conclusion from Chairman Mullen.

In fact, being from another planet, he might even have picked up on something that most Americans would be unlikely to notice -- that, with only slight alterations, Mullen’s blistering comment about Assange could be applied remarkably well to Mullen himself. “Chairman Mullen,” that Martian might have responded, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he is doing, but the truth is he already has on his hands the blood of some young soldiers and that of many Afghan families.”

Killing Fields, Then and Now

Fortunately, there are remarkably few Martians in America, as was apparent last week when the Wikileaks story broke.  Certainly, they were in scarce supply in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and, it seemed, hardly less scarce in the mainstream media.  If, for instance, you read the version of the Wikileaks story produced -- with the same several weeks of special access -- by the New York Times, you might have been forgiven for thinking that the Times reporters had accessed a different archive of documents than had the Guardian crew. 

While the Guardian led with the central significance of those unreported killings of Afghan civilians, the Timesled with reports (mainly via Afghan intelligence) on a Pakistani double-cross of the American war effort -- of the ties, that is, between Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, and the Taliban. The paper’s major sidebar piece concerned the experiences and travails of Outpost Keating, an isolated American base in Afghanistan.  To stumble across the issue of civilian deaths at American hands in the Times coverage, you had to make your way off the front page and through two full four-column Wikileaks-themed pages and deep into a third. 

With rare exceptions, this was typical of initial American coverage of last week’s document dump. And if you think about it, it gives a certain grim reportorial reality to the term Americans favor for the deaths of civilians at the hands of our forces: “collateral damage” -- that is, damage not central to what’s going down. The Guardian saw it differently, as undoubtedly do Afghans (and Iraqis) who have experienced collateral damage firsthand.

The Wikileaks leak story, in fact, remained a remarkably bloodless saga in the U.S. until Admiral Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (who has overseen the Afghan War since he was confirmed in his post in December 2006) took control of it and began focusing directly on blood -- specifically, the blood on Julian Assange’s hands. Within a few days, that had become the Wikileaks story, as headlines like CNN’s “Top military official: WikiLeaks founder may have 'blood' on his hands” indicated. On ABC News, for instance, in a typical “bloody hands” piece of reportage, the Secretary of Defense told interviewer Christiane Amanpour that, whatever Assange’s legal culpability might be, when it came to “moral culpability... that’s where I think the verdict is guilty on Wikileaks.”

Moral culpability. From the Martian point of view, it might have been considered a curious phrase from the lips of the man responsible for the last three and a half years of two deeply destructive wars that have accomplished nothing and have been responsible for killing, wounding, or driving into exile millions of ordinary Iraqis and Afghans. Given the reality of those wars, our increasingly wide-eyed visitor, now undoubtedly camping out on the Washington Mall, might have been struck by the selectivity of our sense of what constitutes blood and what constitutes collateral damage. After all, one major American magazine did decide to put civilian war damage front and center the very week the Wikileaks archive went up. With the headline"What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan," TIME magazine featured a cover image of a young Afghan woman whose nose and ears had reportedly been sliced off by a “local Taliban commander” as a punishment for running away from an abusive home.

Indeed, the Taliban has regularly been responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians, including women and children who, among other things, ride in vehicles over its roadside bombs or suffer the results of suicide bombings aimed at government figures or U.S. and NATO forces. The Taliban also has its own list of horrors and crimes for which it should be considered morally culpable. In addition, the Taliban has reportedly threatened to go through the Wikileaks archive, ferret out the names of Afghan informers, and “punish” them, undoubtedly spilling exactly the kind of “blood” Mullen has been talking about.

Our Martian might have noticed as well that the TIME cover wasn’t a singular event in the U.S. In recent years, Americans have often enough been focused on the killing, wounding, or maiming of innocent civilians and have indeed been quite capable of treating such acts as a central fact of war and policy-making. Such deaths have, in fact, been seen as crucially important -- as long as the civilians weren’t killed by Americans, in which case the incidents were the understandable, if sad, byproduct of other, far more commendable plans and desires. In this way, in Afghanistan, repeated attacks on wedding parties, funerals, and even a baby-naming ceremony by the U.S. Air Force or special operations night raids have never been a subject of much concern or the material for magazine covers.

On the other hand, the Bush administration (and Americans generally) dealt with the 9/11 deaths of almost 3,000 innocent civilians in New York City as the central and defining event of the twenty-first century. Each of those deaths was memorialized in the papers. Relatives of the dead or those who survived were paid huge sums to console them for the tragedy, and a billion-dollar memorial was planned at what quickly became known as Ground Zero. In repeated rites of mourning nationwide, their deaths were remembered as the central, animating fact of American life. In addition, of course, the murder of those civilian innocents officially sent the U.S. military plunging into the Global War on Terror, Afghanistan, and then Iraq.

Similarly -- though who remembers it now? -- one key trump card played against those who opposed the invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein’s “killing fields.” The Iraqi dictator had indeed gassed Kurds and, with the help of military targeting intelligence provided by his American allies, Iranian troops in his war with Iran in the 1980s. After the first Gulf War, his forces had brutally suppressed a Shiite uprising in the south of Iraq, murdering perhaps tens of thousands of Shiites and, north and south, buried the dead in mass, unmarked graves, some of which were uncovered after the U.S. invasion of 2003. In addition, Saddam’s torture chambers and prisons had been busy places indeed.

His was a brutal regime; his killing fields were a moral nightmare; and in the period leading up to the war (and after), they were also a central fact of American life. On the other hand, however many Iraqis died in those killing fields, more would undoubtedly die in the years that followed, thanks to the events loosed by the Bush administration’s invasion. That dying has yet to end, and seems once again to be on the rise. Yet those deaths have never been a central fact of American life, nor an acceptable argument for getting out of Iraq, nor an acknowledged responsibility of Washington, nor of Admiral Mullen, Secretary of Defense Gates, or any of their predecessors. They were just collateral damage. Some of their survivors got, at best, tiny “solatia” payments from the U.S. military, and often enough the dead were buried in unmarked graves or no graves at all.

Similarly, in Afghanistan in 2010, much attention and controversy surrounded the decision of our previous war commander, General McChrystal, to issue constraining “rules of engagement” to try to cut down on civilian casualties by U.S. troops. The American question has been: Was the general “handcuffing” American soldiers by making it ever harder for them to call in air or artillery support when civilians might be in the area? Was he, that is, just too COIN-ish and too tough on American troops? On the other hand, little attention in the mainstream was paid to the way McChrystal was ramping up special operations forces targeting Taliban leaders, forces whose night raids were, as the Wikileaks documents showed, repeatedly responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians (and so for the anger of other Afghans).

Collateral Damage in America

Here, then, is a fact that our Martian (but few Americans) might notice: in almost nine years of futile and brutal war in Afghanistan and more than seven years of the same in Iraq, the U.S. has filled metaphorical tower upon tower with the exceedingly unmetaphorical bodies of civilian innocents, via air attacks, checkpoint shootings, night raids, artillery and missile fire, and in some cases, the direct act of murder. Afghans and Iraqis have died in numbers impossible to count (though some have tried). Among those deaths was that of a good Samaritan who stopped his minivan on a Baghdad street, in July 2007, to help transport Iraqis wounded by an American Apache helicopter attack to the hospital. In repayment, he and his two children were gunned down by that same Apache crew. (The children survived; the event was covered up; typically, no American took responsibility for it; and, despite the fact that two Reuters employees died, the case was not further investigated, and no one was punished or even reprimanded.)

That was one of hundreds, or thousands, of similar events in both wars that Americans have known little or nothing about. Now, Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst deployed to eastern Baghdad, who reportedly leaked the video of the event to Wikileaks and may have been involved in leaking those 92,000 documents as well, is preparing to face a court-martial and on a suicide watch, branded a “traitor” by a U.S. senator, his future execution endorsed by the ranking minority member of the House of Representatives’ subcommittee on terrorism, and almost certain to find himself behind bars for years or decades to come.

As for the men who oversaw the endless wars that produced that video (and, without doubt, many similar ones similarly cloaked in the secrecy of"national security"), their fates are no less sure. When Admiral Mullen relinquishes his post and retires, he will undoubtedly have the choice of lucrative corporate boards to sit on, and, if he cares to, lucrative consulting to do for the Pentagon or eager defense contractors, as well as an impressive pension to take home with him. Secretary of Defense Gates will undoubtedly leave his post with a wide range of job offers to consider, and if he wishes, he will probably get a million-dollar contract to write his memoirs. Both will be praised, no matter what happens in or to their wars. Neither will be considered in any way responsible for those tens of thousands of dead civilians in distant lands.

Moral culpability? It doesn’t apply. Not to Americans -- not unless they leak military secrets. None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and experience an “out, damned spot!” moment. That’s a guarantee. However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn’t want it on his hands, who found himself “actively involved in something that I was completely against,” who had an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms,” will pay the price for them. He will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused. He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar movement that wasn’t.

The men who led us down this path, the presidents who presided over our wars, the military figures and secretaries of defense, the intelligence chiefs and ambassadors who helped make them happen, will have libraries to inaugurate, books to write, awards to accept, speeches to give, honors to receive. They will be treated with great respect, while Americans -- once we have finally left the lands we insistently fought over -- will undoubtedly feel little culpability either. And if blowback comes to the United States, and the first suicide drones arrive, everyone will be deeply puzzled and angered, but one thing is certain, we will not consider any damage done to our society" collateral" damage.

So much blood. So many hands. So little culpability. No remorse.

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]

I visited Toronto in early March 2010 and as I left the country I passed through the usual security check at Pearson International Airport.  What made it different is that the next passengers after me in line were a man, a small child, and a person in niqab.  (I write"person" rather than"woman" as I hardly know who was under the niqab outfit.)

Curious how the niqabi's hidden identity would be handled, I looked back as the trio was dealing with the security agent.  To my astonishment, the agent did not demand to see the niqabi's face but was content to see those of the man and child.  I wanted dearly to video this procedure on my mobile phone but dared not, thinking that this could well get me hauled in on some charge that I, ironically, was breaching security.

This experience comes to mind as I follow a current story about a similar situation at Montreal's Trudeau International Airport.  The Toronto Sun explained on August 1 how Mick Flynn of Bradford, England, was boarding a flight there on July 11

when he witnessed two women with their faces covered board an Air Canada Heathrow bound flight without being asked to remove their veils.  In fact, in the video that Flynn has posted online, a man traveling with the group hands in all the passports and is the only one to interact with airline staff while two veiled women simply walk through.

Unlike me, Flynn did something about this outrage:  "I complained at the desk—and again as I boarded the plane—asking if the pilot was happy that two women boarded without being identified.  Both members of staff whom I spoke to were flustered and clearly embarrassed."

In a public statement, Air Canada insisted that"Airline passengers have already undergone multiple security checks before arriving at the boarding gate.  A final check is made at the gate prior to boarding in order to confirm passengers on the flight."  This, of course, is mumbo-jumbo.  Then, to make the story even richer, Air Canada has threatened a lawsuit against Flynn for his video.

A day later, the Sun followed up with a report from Pearson:

A veteran airline worker at Canada's busiest airport said few veiled Muslim women are forced to reveal their faces before boarding flights.  The long-time frontline worker at Toronto's Pearson International Airport said there is no clear-cut policy given to airline workers on how to deal with this and other sensitive issues. … employees working with various airlines in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa said that checks often occur at the luggage check counter, if at all, and that women who refuse to show their faces are simply allowed to board.

The veteran Pearson worker said there are many factors that have led to what he deems a security risk:  The lack of a clear policy from airline management, worries about political correctness, and often aggressive behaviour from men traveling with veiled women.  "In general, what happens is the woman stands at the back, the man comes up with the documents.  He's quite aggressive and leaves little room for airline workers to challenge him. … So, why would a general worker who is paid $12-$15 per hour take this upon themselves?"

Transport Minister John Baird issued a statement promising to look into the matter.  "If the reports are true, the situation is deeply disturbing and poses a serious threat to the security of the air travelling public.  If our current security policies in this area are deemed to be lacking, our government will take the necessary steps to protect the safety and security of the travelling public."  Today, Baird came out with a more assertive statement:

"I'm the minister of transport, they validate my ID every the time," Baird told Ottawa radio station CFRA."I do have one cabinet colleague that was denied entry to a plane because he forgot his valid ID at home. … We're going to get the facts first and then we're going to take all the action necessary to make sure that the current regulations are followed and followed to the letter."

As for setting up special rooms where Muslim women can remove their veils away from other passengers, Baird dismissed the idea as unworkable.  "I have no intention of establishing special rooms at every single gate so that we can validate someone's identification," said Baird."This is Canada, we're an open society, we're a society where men and women are treated equally."

Comments:

(1)  It's hard to say something original about this preposterous situation.  Obviously, niqabis must not get a free pass onto planes.  If anyone wants a few dozen reasons why, just go to my blog on"Niqabs and Burqas as Security Threats."

apparently, American Reformed ministers are viewed as a security risk by Canadian authorities!  Here I am getting frisked in front of a bunch of my fellow ministers and synod attendees on the same flight out with me (hence the photo).  I'll bet the security people were looking for Cuban cigars—the contraband most likely to be found on a Reformed minister's person.

(3)  It's fascinating to see the impact of a single low-quality video.  Next time, I must not let the opportunity pass me by. (August 3, 2010)