By Mr. Curmudgeon
“The buck stops with me,” said President Obama at a news conference held to assure the American people that the attempted Al Qaeda Christmas Day attack got the president’s attention. In an edited White House report detailing the shortcomings of this administration’s terror fighting competency, a portion of the document reads:
“…The preliminary review suggests that the overlapping layers of protection within the CT [counterterrorism] community failed to track this threat in a manner sufficient to ensure all leads were followed and acted upon to conclusion. In addition, the White House and the National Security Staff failed to identify this gap ahead of time. No single component of the CT community assumed responsibility for the threat reporting and followed it through by ensuring that all necessary steps were taken to disrupt the threat.”
It’s important to remember that the report released to the public was redacted. That is to say, the administration kept the scarier parts secret. The document states the obvious: that billions of dollars worth of “overlapping layers of protection” (read bureaucracy) did little to protect America, and are a poor substitute for an aggressive hunt-and-destroy anti-terror program. As if to underscore the president’s willful blindness to his failings, the Washington Post reported, “Obama didn't tell intelligence officials to dramatically change what they're doing. Instead, he told them to do it better and faster.” The president failed to say how “better and faster” incompetence improves the nation’s security or the safety of the American public.
“There is, of course, no foolproof solution,” Obama insisted. “We have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary.” Not one administration official responsible for the terror breach, Obama insisted, will be fired. It’s Obama’s way of supporting the less than nimble Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and her erroneous assertion that “the system worked.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, “U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed...” It’s less than comforting to know that after hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, and Richard Reid’s shoe-bombing attempt shortly there after, this administration was willing to wait until an Al Qaeda terrorist landed in America before dealing with him. Nothing will shake this administration from the fiction that we live in a September 10th world.
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