Query Builder Protect Identifiers Disable

You are correct, my apologies.  I was getting a mysql error and assuming it was the protection around the alias that was causing the problem.  I was not aware that MySQL allowed that.  It must be something else...I will have to look at the query closer.  It was not happening when _protect_identifiers was off and I had passed FALSE to everything except FROM so just made the assumption that is where the problem was.