What do you do if your agency fails to stop a terrorist with enough explosive materials sewed into his underwear to take down a plane with 300 passengers, from boarding the plane and attempting to blow it up?
If you are the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Security Agency (NSA), Transportation Security Administration (TSA) or the Obama Administration, you issue new security directives, send them out to airlines around the globe, and then when one lands in the hands of a blogger, you go after the bloggers.........
“They’re saying it’s a security document but it was sent to every airport and airline,” says Steven Frischling, one of the bloggers. “It was sent to Islamabad, to Riyadh and to Nigeria. So they’re looking for information about a security document sent to 10,000-plus people internationally. You can’t have a right to expect privacy after that.”
Yes, if you one of the aforementioned groups, you attempt to deflect from the fact that the father of the terrorist tried to warn U.S. officials, walked right into the U.S. Embassy and alerted them.
In the case of Mr. Abdulmutallab, the N.S.A. appears to have captured critical intercepts, and his father provided the name that would have allowed American agencies to take action.
For Mr. Kean, of the Sept. 11 commission, it is the father’s role that should have moved even the most jaded bureaucracy.
“Think of what it took for the father, one of the most respected bankers in Nigeria, to walk into the American Embassy and turn in his own son,” Mr. Kean said. “The father’s a hero. His visit by itself should have been enough to set off all kinds of alarms.”
If you one of the aforementioned groups, you spin your wheels trying to deflect the fact that you failed at your job of making sure information from individual government security agencies is collated to prevent the situation from reaching the point where passengers had to stop the terrorist from taking their lives when the they saw the terrorist's lap on fire.
Intelligence intercepts from Yemen beginning in early August, when Abdulmutallab arrived in that country, contained "bits and pieces about where he was, what his plans were, what he was telling people his plans were," as well as information about planning by the al-Qaeda branch in Yemen, a senior administration official said. "At first blush, not all these things appear to be related" to the 23-year-old Nigerian and the bombing attempt, he said, "but we believe they were."
Agencies under particular scrutiny include the CIA, the National Security Agency -- in charge of electronic intercepts -- and the State Department. Each possessed pieces of the puzzle, none of which was considered overly worrisome or immediately actionable -- absent the other pieces -- under existing procedures. The National Counterterrorism Center, established after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to connect the dots government-wide, did not do so.
If you are Barack Obama, you blame it on a "systemic failure", which is was, but it was a systemic failure under his watch, while he was busy focusing on Obamacare, cap and trade and things like closing Gitmo and releasing more suspected terrorist to come back at us and plan an attack, as is what happened in this Christmas Day terror plot.
One of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit was released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison
Granted, that release was in 2007, under Bush's watch, but the Obama administration has plans to release approximately 100 more.
This morning in Riyadh, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he spoke to Saudi Assistant Minister of the Interior Muhammed bin Nayaf about sending the roughly 100 Yemeni detainees currently in the detainee center at Guantanamo Bay to Saudi Arabia to the Saudi government's rehabilitation program for jihadis.
If you are the Obama administration, you try to deflect by using the "blame Bush" game again, since it always worked in the past, and send your people hunting information on any "systemic failures" when Bush was President instead of focusing on fixing the problems that your administration caused.
On December 26, two days after Nigerian Omar Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to use underwear packed with plastic explosives to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight he was on, and as it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns -- if any -- from the Bush Administration.
"The idea was that we'd show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could," says a staffer in the counsel's office. "We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we'd declassify it if necessary."
It is not National Security, it is politics stupid!!
Another Black Conservative (and don't call me racist idiot, that is the name of his damn blog), calls Obama out on the blame Bush game:
Of course the White House uses the ever-tiresome “blame Bush” tactic. Sweet Jesus, you would think by now they would be embarrassed to go back to that excuse once again.
Guess not, I guess Obama figures he has three more years to use that excuse to justify his own incompetence.
Ok, so I digress, back on point here.
If you are the Obama administration, you try to deflect from the fact that "changes" were made when Obama took office, changes that endanger our country.
This employee says that despite statements from the Obama Administration, such information was flagged and given higher priority during the Bush Administration, but that since the changeover "we are encouraged to not create the appearance that we are profiling or targeting Muslims. I think career employees were uncomfortable with the Bush procedures and policies and were relieved to not have to live under them any longer."
SNIP
"I'm not saying that this kind of screw up might not have happened in the Bush Administration," the State source says, referring to the Christmas Day snafu. "I'm just saying that a number of us were encouraged to have a different mindset about such intel and such individuals, and today, we are encouraged not to have that same mindset."
So, by all means, ignore everything above that led to the "systemic failure" under Obama's watch, send out thousands of security directives to different countries, and go after bloggers that dare to report those directives when the information was handed to them.
Maureen Dowd, a liberal who writes an op-ed column for the New York Times, asks "If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?"
Good question,
Something to think about here:
A Pentagon analysis, released in May, showed that one in seven freed Gitmo detainees—61 in all—returned to terrorism. Al-Shihri and Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, the Taliban's operations leader in southern Afghanistan, are merely the best known. The Pentagon has since updated its findings, and we're told the numbers are even worse.
Yet the White House has resisted calls by Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees to declassify this revised report—no doubt because that would make closing Gitmo harder. Congress should insist on its release.
Here is another question.... why is the Obama administration hiding information from the American public when Obama himself promised more transparency?
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