In yet another career-ending admission of failure, President Bush has once again overhauled the intelligence apparatus of his administration, replacing the CIA and the FBI with the Wal-Mart internal
security team. In its first 48 hours as the nation's spymasters, Wal-Mart arrested Osama Bin Laden, found weapons of mass destruction hidden under the Green Zone in Baghdad, discovered Amelia Earhart
living under an alias in New Zealand, filed a 200-page report revealing that North Korea's nuclear facilities can't produce enough radioactive material to illuminate a single watch dial, and unearthed
Jimmy Hoffa's body from the end zone of Giants Stadium.
"Just routine stuff for us," Kenneth H. Senser, a former top official at the CIA and FBI who runs Wal-Mart's security
department, might have told Over the Line, but didn't. "It is harder to catch cashiers sneaking extra bathroom breaks than it was to find Osama. We just watched a few internal security tapes of the
Wal-Mart in Quetta, Pakistan and there he was buying some video games and about 5,000 AAA batteries. We called parking security and grabbed him when he failed to return his cart to the designated
shed."
Senser's last private sector assignment was to gather evidence of impropriety between Julie Roehm and Sean Womack, a job he described as a breeze. "The great thing about Julie is that she
is so over the top we didn't have to do anything but wait for her to deny stuff, then check her alibi. It was kind of like listening to a five-year-old explain why he has his hand in the bag of
Oreos."
Cracking the North Korean nuclear secrets was also not as difficult as former Bush intelligentsia would have you believe, Senser could have told me. "We put a coupon in the Pyongyang
Times that offered all the food you could carry at the Chongjin Wal-Mart and waited for all the guards at the enrichment facilities to drop their guns and start sprinting to the store. We had a
local floor associate walk in, take a few snaps (with a digital camera he was required to return to the store after the assignment) and we just did kind of a little photo album for Congress."
Finding Amelia Earhart was perhaps the hardest job for the new intelligence team, since she had changed her name to "Emily Erhard." It took Senser's team more than six hours of data crunching to
compare purchases that Earhart had made on Howland Island in 1937 and later at the Auckland Wal-Mart in 2006. "This was especially difficult since there was no Wal-Mart in 1937, but we have
extraordinary relations with vendors that supply virtually everything to every store anywhere in the world. We got the spending data we wanted."
"I gotta tell you, those guys are really good,"
a Wal-Mart shelf stocker told Over the Line, requesting that we not divulge his name for fear he would lose his job. "Arrive four minutes late and you get reported. Don't sing the fight song one day
because you have strep--and 10 minutes later it's in your file and a manager is asking questions. Put the Rice Krispies on the shelf where the cornflakes go and it's 15 lashes. Utter the word 'union'
and you may never see your family again."
When I asked Senser about what the Wal-Mart employee told me, he smiled and said simply, "Bobby Lee Sorcum, Rincon Ga., store, ID #38365."
Over the Line did not confirm or deny, but quietly resolved to stop trying to return items known to have not been purchased at Wal-Mart.
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