Fraternal Knives Come Out Between Anti-Terror Warriors

In Waco Republican Debate - CIA, Army Veteran At Odds

"Chuck (Wilson) does not have any campaign debt, unlike Rob
Curnock and Dave McIntyre, Chuck's most viable opponents." -
ChuckWilson4Congress.com

Suddenly, the standing room only crowd of 200 Republican
Party faithful could see the issue crystallize over their
heads in the elegant ambience of the Roosevelt Ballroom's
antique, chandeliers, alabaster toned lampshades and
hardwood flooring, vaulted and beamed ceilings and ornate
bronze embellishments.

Who has the best chance of defeating Congressman Chet
Edwards come November?

Colonel Dave McIntyre, a career Army paratrooper who until
just recently headed Texas A&M's bold new anti-terror
Homeland Security Doctoral Program, chose to address fellow
candidate Chuck Wilson by challenging him to change the
language in his website.

Mr. Wilson is a career CIA station chief who has headed
missions in the third world hell holes of Africa where brush
fire wars of national liberation left the economies and the
social conditions in tattered ruins. He is credited with
the apprehension and subsequent conviction of Carlos the
Jackal, an international terrorist of Venezuelan extraction
who made it hot for western interests throughout Europe when
he engineered the kidnapping of the OPEC ministers and
numerous jets.

Coming down to the wire in the Republican Primary campaign
to get the nomination to oppose long-term Democratic
Congressman Chet Edwards of Waco, the question now is not so
much who is for what and why, but who can win the general
election and bring District 17 into the Repubilcan fold.

Of all five candidates who appeared and whose performance is
archived on the websites KWTX.com and GOPisforme.com, all
agreed that their qualifications are very similar and their
ideological posture is nearly identical. We're talking no
abortions, term limits for Congressmen and Senators, tax
cuts and an end to deficit spending.

The key difference now is who can win.

Mr. Wilson has chosen to emphasize the fact that personal
contributions to their campaign funds make it appear that
the McIntyre campaign and the treasury of the Rob Curnock
For Congress campaign have accumulated debt due to a quirk
in Federal Election Commission regulations.

If you take money out of your own pocket and put it in your
campaign fund, the authorities demand that it must be
accounted for as campaign debt. You owe yourself, as it
were; therefore, the campaign is in debt.

Said Mr. Wilson, "Campaign debt can be a problem with fund
raising."

Mr. McIntyre requested that he strike the verbiage from his
website and campaign literature. He said, "I owe no money!"

Pinned down on the issue, Mr. Wilson quickly backpedaled
into a general discussion of campaign accounting.

He didn't budge, however. He stuck to his guns. His
campaign finance figures show no debt.

Mr. Curnock claims that since he is the only candidate with
actual experience opposing Mr. Edwards in a general election
campaign, he is the candidate most likely to succeed. He is
a former sports anchor on KWTX TV and the owner of a video
taping service located in Waco. In the general election of
2008, he garnered 45.5 percent of the vote while the Edwards
campaign outspent him 23 to one. This is in a district
consisting of 651,000 registered voters, 63 percent of whom
are Republicans.

The issues of national security display a fundamental schism
between the two candidates with the most experience in the
field of opposing terrorism, Mr. Wilson and Mr. McIntyre.

On the one hand, Mr. McIntyre calls for more transparency in
the Homeland Security apparatus.

"I have read every page of the Patriot Act - all three
hundred sixty some odd pages of it. I've assigned it to my
students. I can't read it. They can't read it." This
inscrutability, he said, makes it hard to maneuver within
the confines of the law, to color between the lines and stay
in the box.

"People don't pay enough attention to what is done under the
Patriot Act, what the FBI does under the Patriot Act."

The law raises hell with any efficiency to be had battling
terrorism because, all the candidates seemed to agree,
terrorism is neither a law enforcement problem, nor is it a
military objective to battle it with troops and navies.
As NATO Commander General Dozier said when he was liberated
from his kidnappers, the Red Brigade, in the eighties, going
after terrorists with the Army is "Kind of like going after
a house fly with a sledge hammer."

How does an expert define terrorism?

"Terrorism is the use of criminal means to enforce political
objectives...It is the Friday afternoon sermon in every
mosque everywhere in the world," said Mr. McIntyre.

On the other hand, Mr. Wilson called for more opacity in the
process.

He chose to paraphrase Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of
the U.S. Supreme Court.

"I can't define terrorism, but I know a terrorist when I see
one."

He said that he sees a need for more secret courts organized
under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act
(FISA). He called for more prosecutions under the auspices
of military tribunals. These courts address crimes of
defendants who are considered military combatants and not
citizens. There is no writ of habeas corpus to be obtained;
defendants may be held incommunicado and without legal
representation indefinitely.

After the 9/11 attacks, he declared, while he was serving in
pariah state of The Sudan as CIA station chief, "I saw the
FBI debrief terrorists for days and days about the World
Trade Center bombing - about matters we had been sending
them intelligence reports about for years."

Why is the enemy the enemy?

"It's their religion. If you are an infidel, you have no
value...There's no moral consequences for killing us in the
thousands."

Mr. McIntyre brought the issue back to Earth with one deft
stroke regarding a Congressional role in appropriating money
for interstate transportation. He reminded the people
assembled there that if there is a natural disaster in New
Orleans or in the Metroplex cities of Dallas/Ft. Worth, the
refugees streaming out of the area are routed through Waco.

It's in the geographic center of the state, right on the
route to the midwest and the rest of the sunbelt.

The problem is that Interstate 35 still consists of two
lanes of concrete, the same two lanes that were originally
built in 1958, resulting in massive traffic jams that can
turn the highway into a parking lot between the I-35 east
and west split at Hillsboro all the way to Temple on even a
normal day.

In terms of waiting for the government to come up with the
money to modernize the national defense routes through
Central Texas, "You're standing in line behind Boise,
Idaho."

Said Mr. Curnock of his experience opposing Mr. Edwards. "I
talked about ideology and he talked about bringing home the
bacon." He ticked off the issues one by one, poor water
quality, a lack of ramp space at Waco International and the
Ft. Hood air field, and poor future development of
interstate highways.

"Most people never look at his voting record," he said of
Mr. Edwards' performance over his multi-term tenure in the
House of Representatives.

"We can fix that with term limits," said Mr. Wilson.

One thing they agree upon, Wilson and McIntyre. That is
that the Obama Administration and the current Congressional
leadership are socialist ideologues.

"We are engaged with brutal Chicago socialists," said Mr.
Wilson.

In a show of hands, about half of the throng of 200 people
indicated they already know for whom they intend to vote in
the primary.

Mr. Curnock reminded them, "In the last (District 17)
election, 55,000 people changed parties to vote Republican."

"This is going to be a referendum on Chet Edwards and Chet
Edwards is going to lose the referendum," said Timothy
Delasandro, a College Station candidate who was a Russian
language expert in the Navy and worked for the National
Security Agency. He now works as a Registered Nurse on
intensive care wards in the Bryan-College Station area.