Dubai is a very curious place. It is run by a very rich sheik who allows very bad things to happen in his glittering little Sheikdom and always gets away with it. It is the kind of place where they give expensive cars away at airport raffles, AQ Khan buys and sells nuclear weapons plans and components almost openly, and the Dubai authorities make few arrests.

Intelligence services operate in enormous numbers with the license to steal, kill, frame and the local cops take no action until after the deed is done. They import hookers from Eastern Europe by the thousands, and they have a special parking lot for all the Lamborghinis and Ferraris cracked up on Saturday night. Dubai is like Las Vegas with much less restraint.

Last month I appeared on Fox News Network’s morning show, Fox and Friends, to talk about airline security. Normally such appearances end up as clips on the Fox News Web site. Granted, the Steve Doocy interview was hardly groundbreaking, but that is seldom a criterion for feeding the beast that is a major cable network news Web site. Curiously, I was quoted in a written piece on the site that got a fair amount of pick-up, but no video.

It was not until a few days later that I learned what may have been behind the absence of a video clip on the Web site. I had said to Doocy that Saudi Arabian money was still financing Al Qaeda. Doocy did not react to my comment. But ten days later I learned that Fox’s parent company, News Corporation, was, at the time of my interview, negotiating with a Saudi prince to vastly increase his stake in the company.

Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan’s report to President Obama seemed the essence of candor. What was released to the public on January 7, 2010, seemed hard hitting and provided the illusion that Brennan had gotten to the bottom of what went wrong on Christmas Day with America’s intelligence apparatus. But like TSA and the rest of the airline security illusion, the Brennan report is another fairy tale told to make us feel better.

The CIA is desperate for a win against Al Qaeda – desperate enough, in fact, to abandon airline security in favor of allowing terrorists to fly in the hopes of following them to a solid lead. They have been doing this at Langley since 9/11. It has not paid off. But as a result, airline passengers are being put at risk every day around the world.

Imagine being in the Armed Forces and assigned to Iraq. You arrive in Iraq, go into brand new barracks built by KBR, step in the shower, are electrocuted, and die.

In Balad, Iraq, you go outside – wars require that – and breath in a toxic chemical stew emanating from giant burn pits all courtesy of KBR. Maybe you were deployed by your state National Guard unit early in the war; you were ordered to guard a facility near Basra, and you discovered that KBR did not make the facility safe, even though that was their job. In fact they did such a poor job of cleaning up the place that you find out those symptoms you came down with back in Iraq – the nose bleeds and breathing problems – are now terminal cancer.

That is the world of KBR.

Its official - New York is so broke the state has now turned itself into a science experiment with the people becoming one big collective lab rat. The bad news is the researchers running the experiment come from Wall Street and Texas.

Forever the slave to Wall Street, New Yorkers are hoping that if enough chemicals are poured into wells dug in the most pristine parts of the state a fortune in natural gas will help turn around their financial bad fortune. Down on the Street the big stock pump is on as drilling stocks for the “Shale play” are being pushed as the next big thing.

The Army and FBI versions of Major Nidal Hasan’s history do not add up. When American intelligence notified the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington last December that the major was sending e-mail questions to a radical cleric in Yemen, the Defense Department investigator allegedly pulled Hasan’s personnel file, read the e-mails and decided nothing was wrong. The cleric, Anwar-al-Awlaki, had counseled three of the 9/11 hijackers during the same time frame that Hasan had attended his mosque in Falls Church, VA. Awlaki has remained a target of American surveillance continuously since it let him leave the country in 2002. Now preaching hate in the friendly confines of Yemen, Awlaki’s activities are known to U.S. intelligence in painful detail.

On Monday morning, September 14, 2009, the Joint Terrorism Task Force executed multiple search warrants in the Borough of Queens, New York. A Denver man was arrested and then released in connection with the terrorism raids. He had recently traveled to Pakistan and then, according to ABC News, showed up in New York last Thursday, September 10, with bomb-making documents. The question no one has asked is how was he able to fly around the world and in the United States unchallenged when thousands of innocent Americans are hassled by Transportation Security Administration agents every day.

For those who think the Obama Administration may be too cozy with corporate interests, there are some disturbing hints that validate this theory that go beyond economic policies.

Such hints can be found in how the Obama White House has treated chemical companies that have endangered the health of millions of Americans with toxins and chemicals left behind by military contractors—including service members and their spouses and children.

The Obama White House, which pretends to care about declassifying government records and then orders documents to be kept secret, is having an “interactive conversation” on the subject, according to a White House press release.

Despite Obama’s post-inaugural Executive Order, all that has changed in the federal government’s FOIA offices is the new photograph of Obama hanging on the wall. Federal bureaucrats are not living by either the letter or the spirit of FOIA regulations. The never ending effort to withhold the embarrassing, the inexcusable, the evidence - from the American public continues with vigor at a pace the Stasi would envy.

While sitting in traffic on I-66, I heard Don Imus interview Huffington Post blogger David Kirby. In the brief few minutes Imus was not talking about his own illness, Kirby said that he reported the North American flu outbreak had been traced to the case of a four-year-old boy who lived close to a massive Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) near his hometown, La Gloria, Mexico.