Maybe if we lived in a county with a very high percentage of Muslim voters who understood the nuances of the Middle East, he’d have a chance. But your average 51st voter doesn’t usually have people at their neighborhood cookouts that have been tied that closely, whether falsely or not, to terrorism. Although we may pretend in this time of political correctness to not stereotype or show bias, the immediate visceral reaction to a connection like this is abhorrence. The 51st is far too close to the Pentagon to get over their distrust.

If Mr. Gill is the Republican candidate, our only hope would be that the “yuck” factor of the nominated democrat would be seriously higher, and we can’t count on that.

Good grief…surely somewhere out there in the entire 51st, is a decent Republican sans baggage that a voter could google up without coming up with names like “Almoudi”, “Hezbollah” and “Hamas”. Come on, are there no other names out there to consider?

So have I, and would agree that in this situation, the relationship would appear to be that of a “contract employee”, or as we most commonly call them, “contractors”.

We can all go round and round with this. Maybe Gill was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong people. The real question is, “Can he be elected?” I would have to say no. Some will say that the voters are sophisticated enough to look past any negative hay the Dems could make out of this. Really? I believe that George Allen would disagree. I also think that it is foolish to believe that it won’t matter in a Gneral election. It will.

By listing “AG Consulting” as the employer, who never actually paid him, it really looks to me that he was trying to hide his association with the AMC and the Islamic Institute specifically on his SF86.

At least that’s the way it looks to me.

I don’t work for the Potomac News.

But somehow, every month I get a check from them, which I would disclose as income.

Are you going to call me a liar? Or are you going to use that considerable brain of yours to realise that a consultant can get paid directly by the people he is consulting for, and also join a consulting group which would pay him and obtain consulting fees from them as well?

On a security form, working for has a meaning that doesn’t include consulting and getting money from. That goes on a different form, which is exactly where Faisel put it.

Now we have even more proof that Faisel was careful to disclose all his arrangements, and that should satisfy anybody who isn’t being sued for libel by someone who hired Faisel to represent him.

Abduraman Alamoudi’s declaration

“We are all supporters of Hamas. Allahu Akhbar! . . . I am also a supporter of Hezbollah.”

is about as likely as him supporting the O’s and the Yankees. Where do you get this stuff?

Faisal Gill tried to explain away the whole blowup about his security clearance by saying that he did disclose the association with these organizations, but that folks looking at the evidence hadn’t realized that he was working as a contractor, and not directly for the Islamic Institute and the AMC. That was his entire defense. Now we see in a document that pre-dates his SF86 that when not concerned about the impact of being denied a securioty clearance he states that he worked directly for these organizations which had ties to terrorism.

Faisal Gill has just been caught in a lie. The original charges in “The Faisal Gill” affair appear to have been somewhat substantiated by Faisal Gill himself. And despite the whitewash of an investigation that was conducted in order to provide political cover, it seems that the accusations were right on target.

I’m sorry if Mr. Gill loses his chance due to a bad break, but the party must choose a candidate that can pass the smell test of average Republicans leaning voters. The party must field candidates that are credible candidates. These average Northern Virginia Republican leaning voters have shown that they are willing to step over the line and vote Democrat if the Republican choice is unpalatable to them, i.e. Jerry Kilgore, George Allen. Baggage is baggage, whether you purposely packed it or someone else smuggled something into your bags.

If Mr. Gill is innocent, couldn’t the party find him a position of prominence within the party and find someone else with no baggage to run in this important election? We’ve got good decent conservative citizens with clean histories in this county, where are they hiding?