In interviews and in federal lawsuits, NSA workers say some of the agency's most senior personnel are being forced out as the nation's biggest intelligence agency attempts simultaneously to reduce and diversify its staff.

As a result, some question whether national security is being imperiled by inexperienced employees being promoted to sensitive jobs to meet hiring quotas.

Let me see if I get this straight... National security is important enough to strip the citizens of their rights and freedoms and trample the constitution into the mud, but National Security is not so important that it can't be compromised for the purpose of removing competent white males from their jobs and replacing them with less experienced and/or incompetent colored people and women.

The main concern, though, is whether, in its push to diversify its work force, the agency is leaving sensitive national security tasks in the hands of untrained workers. One former NSA veteran offered as evidence a recent travel report.

Such reports, which are required of NSA employees after business trips, are unclassified, available on request to anyone outside the agency. The report in question, filed by an inexperienced agent, detailed a trip to a city in Colombia that revealed classified details of the Drug Enforcement Agency's operation, down to the location of offices, names and secret technological information.

Of course, when DEA agents are murdered because of incompetent affirmative action promotees at NSA, the government will call for stronger controls on encryption and greater powers of surveillance of the citizens.

Such slips are not the only national security risk, NSA veterans say. This year, the agency's personnel office, prompted by a growing number of incidents, warned employees against using the Internet to access adult "news" groups and other pornographic sites.

Doing so not only violates NSA work rules but is considered a risk because foreign agents could try to blackmail employees discovered with explicit or illegal pornography.

While the government blackmails its own citizens with legislation which threatens to imprison them for actions matching those of NSA employees.

Now women and minority candidates receive at least one round of extra consideration for promotion, which means a minority woman receives three chances to advance to a white man's one.

Is the White House declaring this a victory for minorities, drug dealers and child pornographers? Politics makes for strange bedfellows. Rodney Mongerfield "Take my rights...please!"