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.

On last night’s Nightly News broadcast, NBC ignored The New York Time’s David Barstow’s Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting on the Pentagon’s “message force multiplyers” – their retired officers – who were paid network consultants pretending to provide the public with independent views and opinions on the Iraq War. NBC is more than a little sensitive that several of the worst offenders among these former brass hats are on their payroll.  (National Security News Service’s Chris Law and David Armstrong gave the story idea to Barstow four years ago.)

The reality and promise of Barack Obama’s presidency is finally upon us. He already has made history by the color of his skin. Now we get to the part that counts: the content of his character. Is Obama a brilliant but ordinary politician of our age or a president for the ages? How he responds to the challenges he faces will tell us if we have elected an authentic leader.