First, I admit up front I have an axe to grind against Chertoff, who made my life a living hell for blowing the whistle on abuse in the case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh when I was a Justice Department ethics attorney.

But I don't think my disdain of Chertoff changes the objectivity of my assertion that he's abusing the public trust by using his former government position to pimp whole-body scanners in his self-serving Op-Ed in today's Washington Post. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

He dismisses why would-be Christmas plane bomber Abudulmuttallab was not placed on a watch-list--his ill-conceived brainchild, which was abused to punish political enemies as much as it was to detect terrorists. Chertoff's solution the first time a terrorist used PETN to explode an airplane? Make people take of their shoes!

Then he touts the benefits of whole-body imagers against the "privacy" freaks, without revealing that his firm's clients include a manufacturer of the body-imaging screening machines currently used in select U.S. airports. There are some choice phrases for this: CONFLICT OF INTEREST, ABUSE OF PUBLIC POSITION . . .