Today President Obama spoke more forcefully as more information has unfolded. There were bits and pieces of information that should have been pieced together, which suggests that US intelligence dropped the proverbial ball. When 300 plus lives are at stake, our intelligence sources simply cannot afford to overlook connecting the dots:
According to the NY Times:
Mr. Obama addressed reporters in his second public statement on the matter in two days, announcing that a review already had revealed a breakdown in the intelligence system that did not properly identify the suspect as a dangerous extremist who should have been prevented from flying to the United States.
“A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable,” Mr. Obama said. He said he had ordered government agencies to give him a preliminary report on Thursday about what happened and added that he would “insist on accountability at every level,” although he did not elaborate.
Mr. Obama alluded to the intelligence in his statement. “Had this critical information been shared, it could have been compiled with other intelligence and a fuller, clearer picture of the suspect would have emerged,” the president said. “The warning signs would have triggered red flags, and the suspect would have never been allowed to board that plane for America.”
Was President Obama tough enough today? Should he say ‘alleged?’ Should he be firing people? This is our second thread on the Christmas Underpants terrorist. I feel there needs to be more discussion. As long as Americans and other innocent people are cannon fodder for these deranged religious zealots. we need to talk and demand safety.
“Tough enough?” Who cares? I don’t need a President who can act “tough” while reading a prepared statement, if that was the important thing, we should have elected the Governor of California. What we need is exactly what the man said. We need to update the polices that were put in place many years ago, and adjust them to new technology and the new information we are receiving from it.
I realize there are hundreds of thousands of leads to sift through, but this is basically a system of lists and I figure a computer can probably do a lot of the work that would be needed to get a guy like this on the no-fly and take away the visa list. And no more of this CIA won’t share with the FBI sh*t. I thought we fixed that during the Bush administration.
The way I look at it, this was a cheap lesson. No one died. We’ll all be safer as a result.
I saw something recently that suggests the key presence of a human error rather than just technical errors in all this. I am not in a position to verify the reporting but I will comment based on what I have seen. It seems that the Nigerian perp was issued a multiple-entry U.S. visa way back in 2008, long before he was in any way a terrorist suspect. His father reported suspicions about his son to Nigerian authorities and to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria only a few months ago. It does appear that someone on our side did, indeed, focus on the father’s report and on the visa; but their idecision seems to have been only to wait until the visa expired in 2010 and have this guy confronted if and when he tried to get the visa renewed. Big, dumb mistake. Whoever that was should have started an immediate process to request a revocation of the visa from State in Washington. At the least, he should have thrown this case to State and Home Security for their immediate perusal and action. There you have one person — probably a “little” person — who was a broken link in the security chain.
Odd, I thought that dope Janet Nap said everything worked perfectly…
Thanks for that perspective Wolverine. Geez, if a father turns their own son in, I would think that would be a very serious and credible lead.
And we are only as strong as our weakest link. Thanks for your assessment, Wolverine. That clarifies much of what probably happened. DHS and State never really got hold of it, it sounds like.
Hello, you are several days behind on your hatred of Ms. Napolitano. I believe she corrected that earlier statement.
Several days behind? I’ve been saying all along she was a horrible choice for this job the day she was chosen. She is an idiot.
Napolitano’s unfortunate initial statement (the reflexes of a politician prompted her to say what she said – a competent Cabinet level official would have been less prone to pounce with soothing nonsense) forces the President to be making multiple public statements. Normally, one would not expect the President of the United States to have to come out and address publicly the mechanics of how we secure the air transport system. If Secretary Napolitano had simply said that the incident was a grave one that requires us to review all measures taken to protect passengers, the President would not feel compelled to come out to clean up the mess. I sometimes worry that the current White House staff over-uses the President, counting on his charisma to take them through rough spots. Ideally, we should see and hear less of our Presidents, not more, and their addresses to us should be reserved for the most significant moments in history. In this case, the cabinet secretary’s idle and careless remarks force her President out into the public. In England, she would have resigned.
Ms. Napolitano’s appearances seem to speak to the unwieldiness of DHS. How many different agencies are now under DHS? If you go to their website you will encounter the Coast Guard riding horses with the border patrol, information on h1n1, forbidden items on a plane, how to get a passport, the list goes on.
Somehow if the EVERYthing Department were less bulky, perhaps it might be easier to get it right. DHS swallowed up FEMA which functioned quite well before it got devoured. It swallowed up the Coast Guard, Secret Service, Immigration, Customs, TSA, the list goes on and on.
Mike Chernoff had many of the same problems. We have just forgotten. Tom Ridge suffered less because most people liked him. He was a bipartisan kind of guy. Today, not so popular, but at the time, people did like him.
Step 1, get rid of Ms. Napolitano…
Imagine standing in a snowstorm looking for two snowflakes that match… that’s what trying make sense out of the bits and pieces of information about the 4 billion people floating around the ether of the universe is like. Surprisingly, we have a few successes; however, people tend to oversimplify a task which is difficult to even comprehend intellectually. There’s just no substitute for proactive humint (otherwise called deep cover spies). We transitioned to a cold war intelligence platform that relied heavily on technology… transitioning back to a more traditional humint based platform to address a stateless, borderless, asymmetrical threat will take a long time.
If you are a middle-eastern Linguist, just look at the classified section in the Sunday Post for interesting opportunities.
We’ve lived sheltered lives in this Country. It was good while it lasted. Now, the threat of being blown up by a terrorist is just one more risk that we face every morning when we get out of bed… like death from an automobile accident or slipping in our bathtub. Most of Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, and South America have lived with this risk for decades. We just joined the club.
When you consider the fact that almost 40,000 people died in traffic related deaths last year, the probability of being killed by a terrorist incident is much, much lower. I’m guessing you will all get in your car today anyway. Why isn’t the President equally outraged by traffic deaths and ordering NTSA to “report back in 24 hours”? One might wonder why we don’t put the resources devoted to the “war on terror” to reducing traffic deaths, curing cancer, making bathtubs safer, etc. We would actually save a lot more lives.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
Your right Opinion, it is a matter of perspective… just think about this for a moment. When Napiltano was governor of Arizona she said that she didn’t see any spill over violence from the Mexican drug cartels. However, at the same time in just one city in her state (Phoenix) an average of 1 person A DAY was being kidnapped for ransom and/or tortured raped or killed. By whom, by Mexican drug cartels.
So, lets take a look at her perspective on that. She looked at it one of two ways… either she didn’t consider them to be violent acts because they were mostly again illegal aliens or she is an idiot.
Lets take a look at Obama’s perspective of the incident, what did he do, he played yet another round of golf and then a few days later put out a statement.
So we have Napiltano who initially thought that the system worked great, who doesn’t think an average of 1 person per day being kidnapped for ransom counts as violence (even though a majority of those kidnapped were either tortured, killed, raped) in her own state. And she is now in charge of keeping us all safe?
And we have a President who got the news, then decided to address it by playing a round of golf. Yeah, national security is on the top of their list all right.
And I am just certain if Napolitano were fired we would all be safer. NOT. I grow weary of people seeking simple answers for complex issues.
Opinion, you certainly are correct about Americans living sheltered lives heretofore. The end of the innocence really came on 9/11, with a few appetizers before that. The day I realized that we lived in a different world than the one I had always know was in a hotel elevator. My little gdaughter was with us. I told my husband we wanted to get out on the terrace level. Her eyes got huge and said ‘why on earth would we want to get out on a level with terrorists.
Don Henley: The End of the Innocence
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FPEBWZ1EOY
Remember when the days were long
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
Didn’t have a care in the world
With mommy and daddy standin’ by
But “happily ever after” fails
And we’ve been posisoned by thse fairy tales
The lawyers dwell on small details
Since daddy had to fly
‘
The song was written several decades before 9/11. Perhaps Henley and Hornsby are prophetic.
And oh yeah, I also love the fact the Obama’s perspective on this is that it was an ‘isolated incident’. Right, Al Qaeda sends an operative to blow up 300 people on a plane to Detroit and then claims responsibility and he considers that to be an ‘isolated incident’. So what does he consider 9/11, a collection of isolated incidents?
People tend to forget that security systems at the point of attack (airline terminals) are the last line of defense and perhaps its most vulnerable and inefficient.
Prior to 2001, no one expected that airplanes would be used as a destructive force amd let’s not forget that the people who perpetrated 9/11 went through the security systems legally and carrying what at the time were legal items. The security sytem was designed to stop hijackers and the nonprofessional ones at that.
Most major failures have been as the result of intelligence failure or at least the ignoring of signs that were present and can be seen 20-20 in retrospect.
A good security system works well in stopping the nonprofessional but it is very difficult to stop the professional who really wants to beat it. There are just too many variables that a motivated professional can use to beat a system. That’s why there is the hype about how good the system is and does not disclose its weaknesses.
The way to stop this stuff occurs way before the professional shows up at an airline gate. It is through intelligence gathering, and I agree with Opinion that good old fashioned intelligence gathering is necessary and we should use the technology to aid the old fashioned ways of doing things rather than replacing them. Because a system is old doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t perform better.
I used to coach soccer and I used to tell goalkeepers not to lower their heads after a score against them. They can only stop X% of shots. The ball got through 10 other players before it got to the keeper. Its the same with security. The security system could only stop X% but they got through thousands of others to get there.
@hello
Hello, I agree with your observation on drug violence. The last time I checked, DHS and DOJ considers domestic gangs (which include Drug Cartels) the greatest threat to the homeland.
I am curious; however, what would you have expected Obama to do after the airplane incident? After the shoe bomber incident, Bush didn’t speak to the American people for six days (compared to Obama’s three day wait). In the end, I believe his behavior reflected a realistic grasp of the situation. In the real world, our security apparatus works. You will never know the successes the Intelligence Community privately celebrates. I’m surprised we haven’t lost more people to terrorist incidents as a product of simple statistics (nothing works all the time… the math simply isn’t on our side). “Getting lucky” counts.
I actually prefer a President who doesn’t engage in the “Theater of Security” ala Dick Cheney. Cheney would have used this to get us into a war with Yemen (ala Iraq).
@hello
Hello, You know, we could shut down the drug Cartels and significantly reduce drug related violence and domestic spending on the “war on drugs” by simply ending the senseless prohibition on Marihuana and treating it like tobacco and alcohol (particularly applying the same rules for driving under the influence, etc). The money we save by shutting down the drug war plus the taxes we could put on Marihuana sales certainly would help our National budget “problem” a bit while freeing up resources to bring Afghanistan to a close..
After that plane incident I didn’t certainly didn’t expect Obama to say okay and then go play a round of golf. Same thing with Bush, I find it unacceptable he would have waited 6 days to address it. Is Obama’s 3 days any better?
@Opinion
Actually, the mexican drug cartels is a major supplier of methamphetamine to the US. Although it is not a major producer of heroin, it traffics so much from other countries that most heroin in this country comes through the mexican drug cartels. I don’t think legalizing marijuana would have any impact on the drug cartels.
@A PW County Resident
I disagree, A PW. Right now (and contrary to the common public perception), the drug cartels make the bulk of their money off of simple “pot”. Cocaine is second (in gross revenue). Of course, anyone can produce meth in their kitchen (if they don’t mind perhaps getting blown up). They are actually attempting to transition to a model where they grow and distribute within our own borders. Our budget crisis has reduced Government presence on Govenment land making that a very attractive alternative.
Of course, we know where the heroin comes from… and where the money ultimately goes. Ironic considering the subject of this thread.
I understand from the 2007 Congressional Research Service report that the cartels are already growing marijuana in the US on Federal government property.
My opinion was based on the fact that the cartels have diversified like any successful venture so that the loss of one substance will not put them out of business. I agree that my term “any impact” was imprecise.
Legalizing marijuana means generally that the major supplier would still profit since they already have fields under production. That would last until someone else produced more at a higher quantity and cheaper. But it still would just reduce profit margins.
Marijuana could also be a good tax basis like cigarettes. Of course then people would start running it.
Opinion, yes, the heroin irony does not escape me.
I don’t like seeing security politicized. Therefore I turned off you know what news this morning. I never thought I would be glad for Blues Clues.
So Opinion, are you okay with our President getting the news and then heading straight out to play 18 on a beautiful Hawaii golf resort?
You sure know how to beat a dead horse, Hello. What would you prefer he did? What do you think George Bush did after Richard Reed tried to set his shoes on fire?
Maybe both Bush and Obama should keep a horsehair shirt in their closets. That way when someone does something nefarious, they can reach in the closet and put it on.
We are speaking President of the United States. Advisors come to the President. I expect million dollar deals, life and death matters and wars have been decided upon on a golf course. I wonder what Eisenhower decided while out on the golf course? He might have talked with his underling generals about D-Day or as president how many nuclear weapons to test.
@hello
Yes, I am Hello. It puts things in “context”. Citizen awareness stopped the incident, no one actually was hurt, and the Country didn’t panic. The President set exactly the right tone by taking action to fix the problem and then get on with his life. The model is that we should do the same.
You still haven’t answered my question… what would you have preferred he done?
Anything other than not missing his tee time Moon…(as I have said, yet again, with no reply….) Is that crazy of me to think something like this should get in the way of his golf game?
I don’t know Opinion, maybe put out a statement saying they were going to look into everything and get to the bottom of how this happened. No need for a TV appearance or even a radio appearance, just something, anything… nope, just a big FORE! On the fairway of some beautiful golf resort in Hawaii.
Doesn’t really project confidence that the administration is on top of things…
Also, I getting so tired of the whole ‘Citizen awareness stopped the incident, no one actually was hurt’ attitude. That is what led to 9/11. This was not a ‘failed’ attempt! If you really look at it this was a successful attempt by Al Qaeda to get a terrorist on a plane, with high explosives and detonate it over American soil. Can you see that?
It’s not oh well, nobody got hurt so no big deal… now watch me hit this putt. It’s that kind of attitude from the Bush administration that got thousands of Americans killed. And you know what, we are exactly right back to where we were then, you have proved my point with “Citizen awareness stopped the incident, no one actually was hurt”.
@hello
…you have proved my point with “Citizen awareness stopped the incident, no one actually was hurt”. I’m delighted to have been of service.
Wow Opinion… that’s the only response, your delighted… you don’t see any resemblance between your feeling about the incident and the pre-9/11 attitude? Nice… well, unfortunately your feeling is the same as this administration.
Remember back before 9/11 when we missed all of the ‘signs’. Just chalk this one up as a sign of things to come and remember the oh so lax attitude towards it when the next time it isn’t such an ‘unsuccessful’ attempt to kill hundreds of people.
Odd, this is all I hear as an actual response from both you and Moon…. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj49V13Iv-4
Ill give you one thing, Obama did say he would ‘never rest’ in the fight against terror… I suppose he was right, playing multiple rounds of golf, basketball, tennis and soaking in the sun on the beaches of Hawaii isn’t really ‘resting’.
Maybe now everyone understands some of the things the Bush administration did. I’m sure that several weeks from now someone will start complaining about tightened security efforts just like they did before this happened. Just remember back to 9/11 I’m sure all that Bush was doing was well excepted by all at the time. I don’t recall much complaining. Don’t be surprised if Obama starts to sound like Bush relative to this matter, then his supporters will have a nervous breakdown.
We aren’t going to stop them – not every place, not every time. Yes,
they are fanatics, but smart resourceful and well financed fanatics.
And their message apparently comes across well to their core
focus groups – young, gullible Moslem males, even educated
ones from wealthy “good” families (including Osama Bin Laden himself).
We are idiots if we think the Feds, who only know how to fight turf wars,
are going to protect us 24-7.
We need to clean house here and take the war to them there – hard.
And we are running out of time.
It’s a shame that so many on the ultra right see a failed act of terrorism as an opportunity to score political points. Our national security is more than a political football, and, in order to take these cheap shots, these people are forced to indulge in a level of hypocrisy and historical amnesia that is simply astonishing.
When Bush II was a young president, thousands of Americans died in a single day. But no one in government and no TV host or pundit even dreamed of using 9/11 as a way to take cheap shots at President Bush. Not at a time when the nation felt under siege, not in a time that we needed to pull together. Years later, information has come out showing that, among other things, an intelligence briefing landed on the president’s vacation home desk, warning of an imminent attack from bin Laden using airplanes as weapons about 5 weeks before the attacks. But even then it was too painful and just too low for the vast majority of Americans to pin such a grave tragedy on just one man. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t the decent human thing to do.
You would think the same would apply for President Obama on a close call where, by contrast, no one actually died. You would think. But then again these are the same people who with a straight face reported on the “issue” of the President’s birth certificate, with no substantiation other than he doesn’t look like an American president ought to look in the minds of our nation’s least educated and most racist buffoons.
The behavior on the right has sunk so low since Obama’s election that I’m ashamed for them as well as ashamed of them. But now that false outrage, scare tactics, and blind partisanship have become, yawn, a daily occurrence, I am no longer surprised.
Hello, I don’t know if you are crazy or not. I do think you are beating a dead horse. It makes no difference what Obama does while on vacation. He did make a statement. What do you think his press secretary did? Robert Gibbs made a statement.
We aren’t one bit safer if Obama plays golf, goes and shoots some hoops or sits with his head in his hands sobbing.
@Witness Too
Nice post. I always enjoy your comments. They’re very thought-evading.
I was wondering. Do they actually teach “creative writing” while being confined to a suite at the nuthouse, or is it something you have to go out on a ledge to do? 😉
@Witness Too
You have done a superb job of taking every single thing the left has been guilty of for the past nine years and blaming “the ultra-right” for it. Listen close. Liberals got it coming, and they’re going to take it for a long, long time to come, and the shame of it is, they deserve far worse than they’re going to get. But hey, for a little while, Pelosi, Reid, and Obama have their little experimental playground that used to be our nation to keep screwing up for another year. So party while you can!
So it doesn’t matter what Obama does on vacation, huh? I used to think that about Presidents and their leisure time……then this happened:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvz9jyf4gUk&feature=PlayList&p=AC1C2B94F7775B55&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=4
Good ole’ Keith Overbite dirtying his diaper over Bush playing gold, while Obama’s played more golf in his first year than Bush played in his first term. Since Mr. Overbite’s little rant here….it does matter. Libs made this bed, now they get to try to sleep in it.
Keith, what a douche….
After reading The Washington Post this morning, it is now clear to me that heads will have to roll. Dennis Blair and Janet Napolitano both have to go (in my opinion). Not because they are directly responsible for the fiasco, but because new people are required with a specific mandate to fix the system and catalyze the rank-and-file bureaucrats into going along. If there is no penalty and absolutely nothing happens, then the bureaucracy will not change. Besides, Janet Napolitano will never again be taken seriously after her initial statements that the system worked.
Slow, you can take it back to the Clinton administration and watch it being played out there. Politics of personal destruction. Thing is, most of us are not straight conservative or straight liberal. I think there are a lot of us out there who would just like some plain, common sense sanity.
I seriously doubt that most liberals want Keith Obermann as their spokesperson any more than most conservatives want the embarrassment of having Rush Limbaugh as their spokesman. I can’t understand why either would want the spittle. Both are loud-mouths who would say anything to get their followers’ approval.
Hello, let’s have a day without vulgar name calling. Not censorship, just a suggestion.
Kelly, I will have to mull what you said over, and read the article. I saw it in the middle of the night but crashed before I could digest it.
(Speaking from personal experience) it’s easy to see what went wrong in retrospect… the simple fact is all systems fail. It’s a shame that we always tend to throw out the folks who gained the experience that just might help prevent the next incident and replace them with folks who have no experience (and have to start from scratch).
Opinion, excellent point. We throw out the very people who have learned from their mistakes. And to people who have not made mistakes, they just weren’t at the wrong place at the right time, or something like that.