As you may recall, last fall the Senate Democratic caucus decided to reward Joe the Lieberman for supporting McCain by letting him remain Chairman of the Homeland Security & Government Affairs Committee. I believe he made some sort of promises.
However, (say it ain't so, Joe!), it seems the Senator is up to his old tricks. He held the committee's first hearing of the 111th Congress last Thursday. Was the subject corruption? Failure of regulation?
Nope. It was that good ol' Global War on Terror.
I'm not entirely sure how Mumbai qualifies as part of "the homeland," and even Joe the Lieberman doesn't particularly draw the lines all that well.
From his opening statement:
First, we need to understand who carried out these attacks. In other words, what is Lashkar-e-Taiba? What are its ideology and its history? What is its relationship to al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups? Does is threaten the U.S. in any way? And what are its ties, both past and present, to the Pakistani Army and its intelligence agency, the ISI?.
Oh, I see, it's the Islamists. Never mind that terrorist organizations have tended to focus on a single country for their terrorism. It's clearly relevant.
Or perhaps, this is the part that convinced him
We also know that leading-edge technologies were used to facilitate these attacks. The terrorists, apparently, used Google Earth to surveil their targets, and communicated with each other and with their controllers back in Pakistan using Blackberries and Skype. How does the use of such tools impact our own efforts to prevent terrorism here at home?
ONOZ! They're using the Internets! Those damned bloggers that brought him down also used the Internets. Coincidence? I think NOT!
And Blackberries? What are they, yuppies or something?
Seriously, though, the terrorists behind the attacks need to be brought to justice, but this is really not relevant to the Homeland Security of the United States. It seems more of an issue for either John Kerry's Foreign Relations or Carl Levin's Armed Services.
At any rate, he he had three witnesses come and testify: Charles E. Allen from DHS, Donald N. Van Duyn from the FBI, and then Ray Kelly from the NYPD, perhaps on the theory that Mumbai and New York are both cities with a gazillion people and are thus likely to be very similar.
In fairness to the Senator, he does have a hearing planned on the financial crisis and failed regulation; "Where Were the Watchdogs? The Financial Crisis and the Breakdown of Financial Governance." It will be occurring the day after the inauguration