Nickolas Kristof writes in the NY Times, "To understand why America's war on terrorism is beginning to sputter, infiltrate the Bush administration's Bat Cave at the intersection of Intelligence Way and Cryptological Court (no, I'm not making this up) at a Navy base here. This is the brand-new homeland defense center from which America will respond to anthrax, smallpox, nuclear attack, multiple hijackings or other shoes still to drop. Tom Ridge, his chest puffed out with pride, showed off the command center on Wednesday to a group of reporters. You had to feel sorry for him, for it was a color-coded moment. Standing in front of four 50-inch plasma television screens, Mr. Ridge hailed the super-classified capabilities of the SCIF. [Unfortunately] the huge plasma screens were devoted to television broadcasts. One of them was showing 'Divorce Court.' The command center is symptomatic of something broader: After an excellent start, the war on terrorism is floundering."

According to the Daily Enron, "Tom Ridge's '93-'98 campaign chairman is set to profit in the hundreds of millions $$ via the sale of municipal water systems in 23 states, with the purchaser being a German corporation called RWE AG. RWE AG already wholly-owns the US's largest construction firm, Turner Construction based in Dallas, as well as the US's largest bitumous coal producer, Consol Energy based in Pennsylvania. Follow the path, with 'mainstream' links... Enron owned Azurix, a corporation that aggressively pursued municipal water contracts around the US. Azurix was sold to American Water Works, which has agreed to be acquired by German utility giant RWE, is the largest investor-owned water company in the US, with more than 22.6 million customers in 23 states.. American Water Works Chairman of the Board Marilyn Ware served as chairman of Tom Ridge's PA gubernatorial campaign from '93 to '98." Is our Homeland Security being SOLD to Germany? We demand a Congressional investigation!

"The new director of the Office of Homeland Security, Tom 'T-Bone' Ridge, has been widely hailed as a hero of the Vietnam War. But there's something screwy about Ridge's Bronze Star...Ridge was stationed in a coastal village in South Vietnam where his company was involved in what his office delicately refers to as the Army's 'pacification' campaign. Pacification was the CIA's reader-friendly word for its extermination of civilian opposition to the US war machine in South Vietnam. Another alias for pacification was the Phoenix Program. It routinely involved sweeps through hamlets to make mass arrests, brutal interrogations, the destruction of villages, napalming of rice fields and wide-spread assassination...So, a veteran of the CIA-run terror program in Vietnam, which left upwards of 30,000 dead civilians, now steps into the top counter-terrorism job here on the domestic front [and possibly to replace Cheney as VP]." So write Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn.

"Want a foretaste of the kind of actions [former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom] Ridge is likely to feel will enhance homeland security? Last July Philadelphia saw coordinated law enforcement involving FBI, local and state police, with covert surveillance, infiltration and disruption of legitimate groups, snooping on email, phonetaps. Protest leaders were arrested early on, under absurd pretexts and in the case of John Sellers (Ruckus Society) and Kate Sorensen (Act Up) held on million-dollar bail. Jailed protesters were brutally handled, denied access to medical care and attorneys. When all was over, the courts threw out 95 per cent of the charges brought against protesters by the Philadelphia police. Ridge presided over an utterly disgraceful and violent denial of freedoms of assembly, free speech and due process." So writes CounterPunch.com.