Terrorists Wanted. No Experience Needed Or Wanted

While it's a welcome first step down a path towards a national identity card, the Homeland Security Department's new dockworker ID won't do much to accomplish its mission of protecting us from terrorists.

Not that HSD didn't try -- it took 'em 469 pages to spell out all the rules requiring dock workers to register and carry an ID card with their photo and fingerprint.

NYT reports more than 750,000 dockworkers nationwide will have to apply for the tamper-proof cards and have their backgrounds investigated -- all in an effort to curb terrorist opportunities at US ports. Let's take a look at who'll be out and who'll be in:

The applicants will have to prove that they are legally working in the United States. They also cannot have been convicted of any terrorism-related crimes like spying, sedition or treason, as well as other charges like murder, improper transport of hazardous materials or illegal possession or purchase of explosives.

Anyone convicted in the past seven years of a much longer list of crimes like possession of illegal firearms, bribery, arson, robbery or extortion will have to seek a waiver before obtaining a card.

Run through the list of the 9/11 perps and you'll see that as long as they had legal residency status, they all probably would have been granted a port ID card. Look at the London subway bombers -- no problems for them, either.

Unfortunately, I can't offer up much to make the program better ... other than Muslims need not apply, but this is still America and that rightfully cannot be a requirement. But obviously, we need a better way to sniff out the bad guys than just looking at their criminal records.

Related Tags: War on terror, Homeland security, Immigration, Terrorism