Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has relieved the Air Force Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Air Force of their duties for being lax in their duties in regards to our nuclear arsenal.

The results of a military investigation into four nuclear fuses sent to Taiwan this spring coupled with an accidental cross-country shipment last year of nuclear weapons by an Air Force bomber have cost the top two Air Force leaders their jobs.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the findings of the report regarding the Taiwan shipments Thursday, and said there has been an “erosion of performance standards” and there are “systemic weaknesses” in the Air Force’s nuclear arsenal program.

As a result, Gates said he consulted with the president and asked Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne — the service’s top civilian leader — and Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Moseley — the top uniformed leader — both to step down. Sources told FOX News they were given the option Thursday either to resign or to be fired.

It is of the utmost urgency that our nuclear secrets and materials be kept in our hands and not allowed to slip into the hands of any foreign country without the express consent of the president and Congress.

Speaks for itself.

Let’s hope that Michael Chertoff’s “gut feeling” that something bad might happen this summer is just the result of something he ate.

But what has the homeland security czar been doing, besides monitoring his belly? While Chertoff was sharing details of his physical distress over the possibility of an al-Qaeda attack, a new congressional report showed how easy it was to fraudulently obtain a license to buy radioactive material. All it took for undercover investigators to flimflam the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was a post-office box at Mail Boxes Etc., a telephone, a fax machine and some fast talking.

“If al-Qaeda had set up a phony corporation in the U.S., they could have gathered enough material to make a dirty bomb,” said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), who asked for the sting operation.

That makes me want to reach for the Pepto-Bismol, too.

At this point, the most powerful nation on Earth has been fighting al-Qaeda for nearly a decade — much longer than it took to defeat the Nazis in World War II. Why does Chertoff still have to worry about al-Qaeda at all?

Maybe because a new U.S. intelligence estimate reportedly concludes that al-Qaeda is growing stronger, not weaker. The terrorist group’s leadership — presumably including Osama bin Laden, whom we haven’t seen in a while — has found safe haven in the remote fastness of western Pakistan. There, essentially unmolested, the group has been able to rebuild and develop a capacity for mayhem that it hasn’t had since 2001, the report is said to assert.

“We see more training. We see more money. We see more communications,” a CIA official told a House committee Wednesday

This is an editorial

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.