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Questions About Kerik
For now all one needs to know is that a timely recent sale of stock in a company called Taser International, Inc., where he has been serving as an outside member of the board, has made the nation's soon-to-be-confirmed new Secretary of Homeland Security nearly $6 million richer than he was just three weeks ago... It is, for example, by no means clear that Kerik did an especially commendable job during the three months of 2003 when he worked in Baghdad heading up the rebuilding and training of Iraq's post-Saddam police forces. In prepared remarks praising the new nominee last week[...]the President was oddly — and utterly — silent on Kerik's work in Baghdad, and perhaps for good reason. Though Kerik presided over the hiring of thousands of recruits for the reconstituted Iraqi police force, most were hired without background checks, and many turned out to be hardened criminals. As a result, some 30,000 of them, or roughly 25 percent of the entire force, are now reportedly being let go, with the U.S. footing the bill for $60 million in severance payments.Arguable, I guess. But, still, we didn't hear much about what he actually did over there, did we? There's also Kerik's never-fully explained role in the 1990s as head of a New York City Corrections Department foundation that was secretly funded with roughly $1 million of tobacco company rebates from departmental purchases of cigarettes using city funds. Kerik's hand-picked treasurer for the foundation, Frederick Patrick, is now serving a one-year prison sentence after admitting in court that he pilfered nearly $140,000 of the foundation's money to pay for collect-call phone sex from inmates. Kerik wasn't the one who did this. Poor character judgement, perhaps, but how responsible does that make him? [...] Then the writer goes off on a long ramble about how Tasers really are dangerous though they're claimed to be nonlethal. For the moment, Kerik seems comfortably in the clear, for whatever his reasons may have been for selling his shares, they are now changing hands for almost exactly what they were selling for when he unloaded them on Nov. 11th — meaning that until now at least, his nomination as security biggie for the homeland has been pretty much a non-event. But I doubt that this is the end stories about Kerik and Taser International, and for what little it may be worth, I at least will be watching to see whether, in the fullness of time, the Department of Homeland Security (or maybe even the Iraqi national police force) becomes a major new buyer of Taser's non-lethal stun guns. I've never heard anything bad about him till this. Sure, one of it means he's a bad pick, but it's sure to come up during hearings. Posted by: growler 2004-12-06 |
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