Here we go, another investigation.

Department of Homeland Security administrators — fearing additional scrutiny — concealed from federal investigators information-sharing breakdowns that left the U.S. vulnerable to terrorists, internal DHS memos and e-mails show.

The documents obtained by The Washington Times lay out how officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) deliberated telling the Inspector General’s Office that DHS agencies failed to share data before opting to withhold their concerns.

“We better be ready to provide evidence and name names because this type of statement is the height of the post-9/11 criticisms,” former Citizenship and Immigration Services Chief Council Dea Carpenter noted in an e-mail to officials within her DHS agency last year.

The e-mail preceded the removal of references to information-sharing failures in the mammoth department from the third and final draft of a memorandum Mrs. Carpenter wrote for Inspector General Richard L. Skinner. Mr. Skinner had begun a probe into USCIS information-sharing shortcomings at the request of Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, who had received numerous complaints of internal problems in the agency.

In the first draft of the March 2006 memorandum, Mrs. Carpenter said: “We also experience agencies that are unwilling or unable to share all or part of the information they have, notwithstanding ongoing suspicions. Some agencies close out investigations pertaining to suspicious activity but refuse to share the information they have. It is imperative that USCIS receive any and all information so that it can determine whether an individual is eligible for the immigration benefit being sought.”

It noted “the vulnerabilities caused by law enforcement and intelligence agencies who do not post lookouts of potential threats, or proactively share such information in another manner, so as to ensure we do not grant immigration benefits to persons who pose a threat to national security and/or public safety.”

The Inspector General”s Office never saw the information contained in Mrs. Carpenter’s original. The Washington Times obtained all three copies, which include numerous edits annotated in blue.

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This is an editorial in the Washington Post by John McQuaid. I think this guy has hit the nail on the head.

Even as rescue workers searched for more victims of Wednesday’s deadly collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, inspectors were dispatched to eyeball thousands of bridges nationwide, looking for other potential disasters — of which there are, apparently, many. In a 2005 report, the Federal Highway Administration rated more than 75,000 U.S. bridges, about an eighth of the total, as “structurally deficient.”

While we’ll learn more about the specific causes of the collapse in coming weeks, it has been clear for a while that our aging national infrastructure network — bridges, roads, dams, levees — isn’t standing up well to intensifying levels of stress.

But the bridge disaster also reflects a broader and more troubling problem. The United States seems to have become the superpower that can’t tie its own shoelaces. America is a nation of vast ingenuity and technological capabilities. Its bridges shouldn’t fall down.

And it’s not just bridges. Has there ever been a period in our history when so many American plans and projects have, literally or figuratively, collapsed? In both grand and humble endeavors, the United States can no longer be relied upon to succeed or even muddle through. We can’t remake the Middle East. We can’t protect one of our own cities from a natural disaster or, it seems, rebuild after one. We can’t rescue our citizens when they’re on TV begging for help. We can’t even give our wounded veterans decent medical care.

We’re supposed to be an optimistic, problem-solving nation, the country that tamed a vast wilderness, won World War II and the Cold War, put men on the moon, built the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam. But somehow, can-do America has become a joke, an oxymoron. We’ve become the can’t-do nation, slipping on every banana peel on the global stage. Of course, we’ve had our share of failure in the modern era — the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, the Iranian hostage crisis, two space shuttle disasters — but the sheer scale of our current predicament is something different.

Even Americans’ usually boundless self-confidence has taken a hit. In 2002, a Pew poll showed that 74 percent of respondents agreed with this statement: “As Americans, we can always find a way to solve our problems and get what we want.” Five years later, the number has fallen 16 percentage points, to 58 percent. Annual polls taken by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion have found public confidence in the government’s ability to respond to terrorist attacks, natural disasters and health crises such as avian flu dropping steadily over the same time fram

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I’ve been following the story of the man with drug resistant tuberculosis for the past few days and it is a very troubling story.

The man wanted to get married in Greece, saw his doctor for something and was told he had TB. He says he was advised not to go on the trip but not told he couldn’t go on the trip.

After he had been on a couple of planes, sitting around dozens of people, he was finally tracked down in Italy by the CDC, who told him he had a very deadly form of TB and to go to the US Embassy or an Italian hospital for treatment and isolation while the CDC worked on getting him back to the States.

He decided on his own if he followed those instructions he would die, so he headed to Prague and hopped a flight to Montreal then drove back into the United States and turned himself in in New York.

Did I mention he was told his passport had been flagged and he was on a no-fly list?

Now everyone is going crazy trying to locate all the passengers he might have infected so they can get a skin test to see if they have TB. His wife doesn’t, and he claims he wasn’t coughing on the flights.

How did this happen? If this guy, who had his passport flagged and was on a no-fly list could so easily re-enter this country or enter any other country, how easy would it be for anyone who has a mind to inject himself with the bubonic plague, ebola virus, superflu or any other disease that could potentially kill millions in a pandemic to get into this or any other country?

Homeland Security doesn’t seem to be living up to its title. It doesn’t just mean watch out for people in turbans praying loudly in an airport anymore. Those are the easy catches.

The other bad thing about this incident? Even though he was doing all of this against the CDC instructions to not do it he never broke a law and has not been arrested. He is in a hospital with federally enforced isolation now, but they’re still looking for those he came in contact with and could have exposed to a deadly form of TB.