In light of the recent terrorist attempt on the North West Airlines  flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, are our US air security checks reactive or pro-active.  It seems that so many of the  procedures we have to go through react to that which has previously happened rather than  what might happen.  Does this make us safer?  Do people who want to hurt us keep trying the same failed attempts to do the same thing?

 

Should we start looking at Muslims closer?  Should we start profiling people rather than making everyone from infants to grandparents jump through the same hoops?   Has any terrorist caught not been a Muslim?  These are the questions that have been bandied about by the talking heads on TV this past weekend, since the detroit incident. 

Are we safer than we were before 9-11 and if yes, why?  It seems that billions of dollars have been spent on fancy equipment and when all is said and done, it is the passengers who are putting these terrorists down.  What can we do further to keep those who want to harm us and their materials off our planes and away from our people?

66 Thoughts to “Pro-Active or Reactive?”

  1. Slowpoke Rodriguez

    So let’s see if I got this straight. The Federal Government spends millions and millions (probably more like billions) on equipment and personnel and procedures, and terrorists still get through, and the citizens themselves ultimately have to pick up the ball. You know what would be a great idea? Let’s hand over health care to these jokers! It’ll be soooooo great!!

  2. IMHO, safety from terrorism is far more important.

    I don’t know that it is fair to say that the govt. has done nothing. How many have they stopped that we don’t know about?

    Let’s wait to see what the health care is all about before we shoot it. No one knows because the loud mouths on both sides have monopolized the conversation. The average Joe out there isn’t really sure what all is coming down.

  3. Don’t we have enough domestic terrorists out there to warrant EVERYONE being checked?

  4. Witness Too

    If we entertain the idea of looking more closely at Muslims than other people, how do we decide what a Muslim person looks like? I can think of Muslims who made the news who are Arab, Caucasian, Afican American, African African, Latino, and Asian.

    If we set out to profile Muslims and end up harassing people who look Muslim but aren’t, such as Indian and Native American people, are we better off for it because a wider net brings in more brown people and less Caucasians?

    I don’t know. I am trying to sort this out. What if we profiled by age and gender? All men under 40 get extra scrutiny? I just don’t know.
    Expand the no-fly list to anyone who is reported on instead of just those with credible evidence against them?

    In times like these it’s hard to think straight because we are afraid. I hope that our leaders do not try to exploit this fear as they have in the past. Invading Iraq again makes no sense to me even if we are a bit afraid.

  5. Second-Alamo

    I can guarantee you that what ever group is less scrutinized is the one the terrorists will recruit from. They may live in caves, but they aren’t stupid (unfortunately).

  6. Rick Bentley

    The Nigerian apparently got on the plane in Amsterdam without posessing a passport, with assistance from a well-dressed man who appeared Indian – http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/flight_253_passenger_says_at_l.html

    Quite likely, for a small bribe, the guy was let on.

    So the real issue here is how our security is compromised by allowing international travelers to pass through without them having been checked through our own procedures.

  7. Formerly Anonymous

    Well, we could start by revoking the visas of people who are already on our terrorism watch lists. (Instead, the Government just flagged this would-be murderer’s visa for review when it expired in 2010 or 2011) Next, we could make sure that anybody who is on a terrorism watch list gets put on the “no-fly” list. Or if that’s too offensive, could we compromise and require that everyone on a terrorism watch list should get a pat down search before they are let on board an airplane? (Yes, I know he cleared security at AMS, but DHS still approved the passenger manifest with him on it.)

    The good news about this latest attack is that enough plain, old ordinary folk have figured out that you can’t rely on the Government to protect you from these lunatics and are willing to take matters into their own hands to stop them. The bad news is that this is necessary, since the Government doesn’t seem to have progressed very far from when it issued a visa to Mohammed Atta, six months after September 11th.

    This incident was beyond embarrassing for the Government. I mean the guy’s own father contacted the US government to share his concerns about his son’s radical ideology. And through incompetence or political correctness, we still can’t keep him from carrying explosives onto an airplane? The only plane this guy should have been catching was the Gitmo express.

  8. Rick Bentley

    All good points.

  9. Emma

    I feel so much safer now that passengers will be required to remain seated during the last hour of flight. Good thing terrorists won’t think to try to blow up the plane 90 minutes before landing.

    And once again, the President who shot his mouth off about the Cambridge police officers acting “stupidly” has urged us not to jump to conclusions in this case. Hey, he’s on vacation, dammit!

  10. Emma

    This incident is prima facie evidence that this PC-driven government cannot and will not do anything that will truly protect you from terrorist acts by radical Muslims. You will bear all of the burden and expense of increased “security” measures, but none of those measures will ever be targeted in any meaningful way. Ultimately the passengers had to take matters into their own hands, in the same way that passengers on board United 93 had to on September 11. We haven’t come very far, have we?

  11. Rick Bentley

    “US President Barack Obama on Monday vowed an all-out pursuit of plotters of a failed Christmas Day bombing of a US-bound airliner, vowing “we will not rest” until they are captured and tried. ”

    That works for me.

    And racial profiling IS in effect as I understand it. in the 2000 election Bush and Gore each promised to make racial profiling illegal, and Bush had Ashcroft starting work on that. But it didn’t happen. As it shouldn’t.

  12. Lots of good points being made. Witness, I don’t think people look Muslim and more than they look methodist. However, you can tell often by religious garb and expressions of religion and sometimes people admit to being a certain religion.

    Emma, I don’t recall the president saying not to jump to conclusions. What conclusions could we jump to at this point? I agree with you that the Cambridge remark was not a good thing.

    There was some hilarious comedy scene done by a black comedian about a terrorist flight in to Detroit. It wasn’t all that politically correct, but I would love to find it and listen to it. Does anyone know what I am talking about?

    SA and Rick, good to see you back. I hope you both had a good holiday. Lots for you to comment on and grumble about . 😉

  13. Rick Bentley

    Ah, there always is. I expect to be at least as bad-tempered in 2010 as I ever have been. Hope your holiday was better than mine.

  14. clueless

    It is my opinion that if a person is on a list that identifies him/her as a possible terrorist, the US government can and should deny them the ability to fly to the US (or take a boat for that matter). It is defensible and reasonable. I agree with Alamo that if we start to rely on profiling, the terrorists will more heavily recruit other nationalities.

  15. Emma

    I fly a lot. I will have to endure even more burdensome security measures now. Those measures cost me time, aggravation and tax dollars, but it is clear that they do not (and will never) result in increased air safety. It’s all an illusion, smoke and mirrors to make you think something is actually being “done” about “man-caused disasters.”

  16. Emma

    Just imagine if George Bush were president instead. From the official newspaper of the Obama administration:

    But so far in Hawaii, the Christmas Day incident has not required a presidential appearance or Obama’s rhetorical skills. Instead, after going to the gym and playing basketball with a small group — including friends and staff — Obama took his family and friends to a Marine Corps base beach that had been closed for the presidential entourage.

    His aides noted another important balance Obama is trying to strike: between work and play, his job as president and his family, his public profile and a personal retreat that has been almost completely private for four full days.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/27/AR2009122702070.html

    We sure wouldn’t want upset the “balance” with petty issues of terrorism. And whatever the hell happened to “investigative journalism”?

  17. Rick Bentley

    You’re upset I guess that Obama didn’t rush to the cameras to exploit the incident and make some strained arguement that we needed to consolidate more power in his hands to combat this. I suppose George W trained you towards this reaction. When something bad happens, turn the Threat Level to mocha-purple, invest in duct tape, and pull the lever Republican.

  18. I am going to let Rick have the floor on this one. I can’t match that.

  19. Emma

    No, I’m just noticing the kid-glove treatment this president gets for taking personal time and downplaying this security failure and utter embarrassment for the U.S. government. Utterly hypocritical. Actually, I would say that your response to me is rather knee-jerk, Rick.

  20. Rick Bentley

    “taking personal time” as opposed to his predecessor who spent 490 days at his ranch (a third of his Presidency) and 487 more days at Camp David, and who fell down “choking on a pretzel” which I assume is a euphomism for being drunk.

    “and downplaying this security failure and utter embarrassment for the U.S. government”

    Bush’s whole assumed machismo was in large part an attempt to cover up how little a damn he gave about the issue prior to 9/11, and the fact that Condoleeza Rice was sitting on a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” which indicated that our enemies might hijack our planes and use them as weapons.

    That doesn’t make Obama a hero, but I think that what you’re really thirsting for is the illusion of a leader, rather than balanced and reasoned leadership.

  21. Rick Bentley

    Speaking of being drunk, has everyone seen the footage of Max Baucus slurring on the Senate floor? Good to know that we have such leaders carving out a brilliant path on health care reform – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5Y9X5ggxzA

  22. Wolverine

    It would seem to me that neither the government nor the passengers on that Amsterdam-Detroit flight saved the lives involved. The only thing that prevented a deadly disaster was: (1) the bomb maker made a mistake in his construction of the bomb or (2) the suicide bomber made a mistake in his execution of the attack. When that Dutch passenger jumped over the seats and took down the bomber, it appears to me that the bomb had already been ignited and then fizzled. If everything had gone according to plan, we would be discussing a very different story here. I’m not trying to frighten anyone — just advising that, in situations like this, you have to recognize the realities before you can seek a solution. In this particular instance and in my opinion, we seem to have escaped a bullet by the sheer luck of the opponent making a mistake.

    At this very moment, the bomb maker is reviewing his techniques and his materials to see where he can make improvements, especially in view of reports that the detonator may have been faulty. The operations planners are noting what has now been revealed about how the suicide bomber got on the flight to Detroit and will soon be making adjustments to refine their procedures, both to avoid in future what has been revealed in this particular case and to defeat any new procedures we may initiate. Second-Alamo is right on the mark. These people may be crazy but they are not stupid.

    When you play a contest only on defense, the fact is that you have to be either very good or very lucky 100 per cent of the time. Your opponent only has to break through your defenses once in order to demonstrate that he can beat you. If you really want to win, you have to be pro-active. You have to go after the enemy where they live. You canot simply sit back and hope that your defense will always stop them.

    Profiling is one method of being pro-active. It is not a pleasant thing to do, and sometimes it can result in a temporary injustice or, at the least, some hurt feelings. But, if you fail to pursue that tactic, possibly because of a fear of political criticism and retribution, you vastly increase the risks of the death of innocents. You must decide what is more important to you: saving the lives of innocent persons or avoiding political criticism and possibly some retribution. This is not a game of bridge here. This is a contest in which the wages of failure can be death — possibly even your own death. If you adhere to the politically safe route and people die because of it, will your conscience be clear? Can you live with that?

    Profiling, however, can be a very tricky and problematic thing. Some make much of the idea that we would be profiling Muslims on the spot, often unfairly. Think a little bit. The enemy is not stupid. During the Civil War, when the opposing sides sent spies into the ranks of the facing army, those spies usually concealed their real identities, posing as contrabanders or sympathizers and sometimes even wearing the uniform of the other side. They did not openly act like they were Union or Confederate sympathizers, something that would be sure to draw the attention of the adjutant-generals in those armies. So, how long do you think it will take our current enemy to start training its suicide bombers to avoid all outward signs of being Muslim? They have already gotten the idea that we are profiling Arabs or other Arab-like ethnics. This time they sent a Black guy — an African. Next time? Who knows?

    Profiling is an art form. It involves much more than race or ethnicity. It also involves notation of on-the scene behaviorial traits, something in which a good security agent will be trained to proficiency. It also involves judgement based not only on what you see in front of you but also on what pops up on your computer screen concerning this individual and his travel details, including routes, payments, and security reports. More than just race or ethnic origin is a factor in a profiler’s decision-making. If a profiler depends only on that factor, he will be defeated when the enemy understands that his action agents can get past the screen if they do not have a particular racial or ethnic profile. I believe you may have just seen that happen on that flight to Detroit.

    Having said all this and, while not being in on all the details of this case, I would say that the major error came when the name of this man went on a suspect list but not on the no-fly list. The former list is immense, but I would suspect that a computer can spin through it pretty rapidly. Another disconnect appears to have come when he was granted a visa even though he was on that suspect list. At the very least, this guy should have been pulled from the line in Amsterdam and subjected to a lengthy interview and a thorough body search. Of course, he would have screamed and hollared about his rights — up until the moment they found the liquid explosives taped to his torso. Anyone who is innocent but still subjected to this kind of investigation would surely scream and hollar also about a violation of rights, but think about that for a moment. If a security agent perceives reasons for concern and then declines to act out of fear of some future retribution, he is not really doing his duty to protect your life, is he? The dead have no rights.

  23. “It also involves notation of on-the scene behaviorial traits, something in which a good security agent will be trained to proficiency. It also involves judgement based not only on what you see in front of you but also on what pops up on your computer screen concerning this individual and his travel details, including routes, payments, and security reports.”

    Wolverine, what you are describing above isn’t profiling, IMO. You are recommending more of an investigation of a suspect. To me, profiling means, “Oh. He looks Arab. Let’s strip search him.” Your method sounds reasonable and fair.

  24. Rick Bentley

    Good points Wolverine.

    I assume no budding terrorists are reading this message board so let me say – when these guys show a little more imagination beyond just attacking planes, they will cause more problems. I for one am uncomfortable with a society where we have undocumented immigrants working in food processing by the millions.

  25. Emma

    Rick, why do you assume that any criticism of this current President must be coming from a diehard Republican and Bush supporter? I don’t get that kind of binary thinking.

    This is a huge screw-up and an embarrassment, and it will be very interesting to see who will have to fall on his or her sword sometime in the next week or so to deflect blame from this president. As we saw with the party-crasher Salahis, all it takes in one person, one wink-and-nod and a willingness to bypass normal procedures for the illusion of “security” to break down.

  26. Rick Bentley

    Your personalizing the issue onto Obama so quickly and fervently has a partisan ring to it. I don’t believe that he’s overseen any meaningful changes in security procedures.

    But yes it does speak badly to Obama’s/Napolitano’s/our DHS. Napolitano seems to be in cover-up mode.

  27. Emma

    He’s taken no interest in making meaningful changes in security procedures. The DHS secretary is a complete buffoon who can’t even keep the story straight from one news program to the next.

    I’m willing to bet it was nothing more than PC that kept Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab off the no-fly list. In the meantime, my 80-year-old mother-in-law will be forced to hold her bladder an hour before landing just in case she intends to ignite her PETN-infused Depends.

  28. I don’t see why The Christmas Day incident is embarrassing to the Obama administration.

    Emma, you somehow think Obama is supposed to ride in on a white stallion and solve all the problems. I sure don’t expect that. We will have to continue to tweak our security. I am not cutting on the Bush administration either. How about just an embarrassment to the country? More than an embarrassment, I am more on Wolverine type of thinking…that we dodged a bullet by luck. Had everything worked right, he is right. The conversation would be different.

    Wolverine, those are extemely interesting points.

    Pinko, that is what you think profiling means. It is far more involved. The FBI profiling school has been in the Manassas area for years. You are thinking of ‘racial profiling,’ not ‘profiling’ in general which is how most crimes are solved.

    2 great TV shows that involve profiling are Criminal Minds and Numb3rs. Different methods are used.

    I don’t really much care at this point who gets their feelings hurt. This crap needs to stop. We need to look to Israel. They walk a tightrope daily on this subject.

  29. I like Napolitano because she is an underdog. DHS is a HUGE agency that includes more departments than any other cabinet post. It needs to be downsized and its departments farmed out to other areas. How on earth can anyone walk in and be on top on anything as massive as DHS. Now that we can blame Bush for.

    Napolitano has taken a hit from the first day she showed up at work. So did Skeletor…I can’t think of his name. Chirnoff?

    You cannot ask any one person to be an expert on everything. She has greater responsibility than the Secretary of State.

  30. Emma

    I don’t think he is supposed to ride a white stallion and solve all the problems. I never imagined, given his inexperience, that he would be capable of that in the first place, so my expectations were already rather low on that account.

    Obama gets to be characterized as calm and cool, while George Bush was relentlessly criticized for spending 7 minutes finishing a book he was reading to schoolchildren on 9/11, rather than dashing off and stopping the planes single-handedly. The 9/11 Commission report said that the President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening.

    Bill Sammon writes in “Fighting Back: The War on Terrorism from Inside the White House,” that Bush’s Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was in the back of the classroom holding a pad on which he had written “Don’t say anything yet.” The media conveniently chose to ignore this.

    I’m no Bush supporter, and I never supported the war in Iraq, but I can also recognize when the image and the message are being carefully controlled.

  31. Witness Too

    Rick, thank you for making that point and for making it so well. I can’t imagine why anyone would prefer to see the administration react with false grandstanding and a political power grab, using the fear the terrorists created for their own political advantage and a war for profit in the wrong country. They can try all they want to explain but it just sounds like blind partisanship to me.

  32. Emma

    Is someone here advocating war and political power grab? I must have missed that comment on this thread.

  33. Witness Too

    Emma, I don’t know if this is you per se, but if a person sat quietly by while the Bush administration ran record surpluses into record deficits and ran up an unprecedented national debt by initiating new social programs and starting wars of choice without paying for them, or worse, if he/she supported Bush and thus his policies during that time, then a sudden boost in political awareness following Obama’s taking office is a little hard to swallow. Either you are advocating for a continuation of the Bush policies that created this mess, or you are complaining about the steps both Bush and Obama took to minimize the damage. Or, it’s just blind partisanship.

    By the same token, if you silently nodded your head when Bush and Cheney used the terror that resulted from acts of terrorism to horde political power and frighten and deceive the nation into supporting the invasion of Iraq, and then complain when Obama chooses a different path, it’s either advocating for a continuation of the Bush approach, or it’s blind partisanship, basically attacking Obama no matter what happens in the world and no matter what he does. The former is nonsensical to me if you love your country, the latter is logical in its own partisan way, but it is so utterly predictable and so completely hypocritical that I think most Americans can’t take it seriously.

  34. The Bush/Gore battle for the presidency was such that people had very hard feelings. I don’t think we can compare how people felt then to how people feel now. No one, to my knowledge, felt that Obama stole the presidency from McCain.

    People did feel that Bush stole the presidency from Gore. Thus, emotions were still at high tide. Had it gone the other way, I am sure the people would have felt the same way on the other side and criticism would have been high.

  35. Emma

    I’ll repeat that I’m no Bush supporter, and I never supported the war in Iraq. You believe that Obama is wise and measured in his responses because the Washington Post tells you so, and that is enough for you. So far all we have to measure this president by is in the content of his speeches and his blunders with the Cambridge incident, the embarrassment in pitching the Olympics, the useless private-jet-fueled environmental convention in Copenhagen with all of its vague and empty declarations, the lapse in security in the White House, and the undeserved Nobel prize selection just two weeks after inauguration. Given his inexperience, it will be easier to judge this president when actions actually bear fruit.

    The important question is whether we are actually safer now than we were pre-9/11. The answer is that the security which we purchased at the high price of our personal liberties is an illusion. And this new administration will perpetuate this illusion rather than tackle Muslim extremism head on.

    @Witness Too

  36. A PW County Resident

    Witness, perhaps people have forgotten that when Bush took over, the dot-com bubble had burst and we were already headed for a recession. I am not going to get into a who is a better President, but let’s be truthful about the state of the economy. The surpluses were already going away when Bush became President. And guess what has happened this year? We have even higher deficits based upon stimulus package that has been questionable on its own. The TARP is what stopped the bank failures and brought us back from the brink, not the unbridled spending.

    I think the board needs to tone down the partisan posts on both sides.

  37. Witness Too

    M-H I think the proper comparison is how the two presidents have been treated when the nation is coping with the treat of terrorism. On that score Rick Bentley has it right. Anyone who is critical of Obama after the “underwear bomber” but gave Bush a pass after the “shoe bomber” is reflecting poorly on themselves more than anyone. It’s blind partisanship.

    But I don’t think the 2000 election has anything to do with this. If there was any will to blame Bush for not protecting us after 9/11, it was crushed by a wave of patriotism (I mean the real and original meaning of patriotism) and a collective desire for healing and, I dare say, revenge.

    But seriously no one who voted for Gore reacted to 9/11 any differently because of the circumstances under which Bush was awarded the White House a year earlier. Bush’s drop from 90 percent approval to 25 percent was due to his performance after 9/11, NOT due to his failure to prevent it. Most Americans gave him a pass on that, and do to this day, no matter what the President’s Daily Brief said about Bin Laden planning to attack inside the US. In our hearts I think we feel it is just too mean and too unfair to blame one man for all that death and sorrow. I would never wish that on anyone. Can you imagine how he would feel?

    If I really think about it, if I harbor any anger toward anyone from the pre 9/11 era, it is toward progressives who voted for Ralph Nader under the assumption there was no difference between the two political parties. They should have known better. But people who voted for Bush didn’t know better and couldn’t have given the things they were made to focus upon. If anyone in the country still thinks Clinton’s marital infidelity was a bigger deal than the half dozen national catastrophes we suffered during the Bush years, well all I can say is I feel sorry for them, and, for our country’s sake, I hope they are increasingly outnumbered in this the information age.

  38. NoVA Scout

    The key demographic is 20-40 year old males. The problem with profiling, however, is that it simply defines the most effective work-around for the terrorists. If we profile persons with Arabic (or Indonesian, or Afghan, or Persian, or Moroccan, or Pakistani) surnames or appearances, you can be very sure that the bad guys will recruit a Japanese grandmother wearing a crucifix to pop the next one.

  39. Hopefully any president would have people at the helm to handle these things. I feel certain that both President Bush and President Obama want to do anything within their power to keep people safe on American planes. (and any other planes coming in out air space)

    What do we need to do to keep people safe? This is just making me never want to fly again. Too big of a butt pain to be bothered.

    It makes no sense for people to want to do this, in my world.

  40. Witness, I heard many people criticizing how bush handled events on 9-11 and afterwards. Personally, I just think that kind of thinking is counterproductive regardless of who the president is.

    People don’t realize how much in control the secret service is. They tell the president what to do, not vice versa. If they say stay up in the air for 4 hours, you do it.

  41. Emma

    “What do we need to do to keep people safe? This is just making me never want to fly again.”@Moon-howler

    Take up knitting. When you fly, not only will you produce lovely gifts for friends and family, but you will have 11-inch TSA-approved tools for defending yourself against terrorists.

  42. Wolverine

    Witness Too — For some of us the marital infidelities of Bill Clinton were nothing but an unsavory sideshow. The key to my personal criticism of Clinton is how he and his cronies undermined the effectiveness of the counterterrorism agencies in this country. What Reagan began building into a pro-active organization primed to go after the terrorist killers in their own lairs, Clinton proceeded to shackle under the sole rubric of “law enforcement.” Not the least of Clinton’s sins was that “wall” that his people caused to be built between the CIA and the FBI after Reagan and Bush I had gone to considerable lengths to finally dispense with the inter-agency rivalry and hostility that was a legacy of the J. Edgar Hoover era.

    In effect, Reagan and Bush I unleashed the counterterrorist dogs of war. Clinton chained them up again in the backyard. Kovar Towers came as no surprise to me. The USS Cole came as no surprise to me. The embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam came as no surprise to me. Not even 9/11 came as a surprise to me, although I was thoroughly shocked by the audacity and the choice of targets. There are still some who blame Bush II for not paying adequate attention to the al-Qaeda threat during his first seven months in office, despite the fact that he was still essentially in a transition lengthened by the dispute over the 2000 election. But, either way, it is my strong belief that al-Qaeda profited from the diminished counterterrorism effectiveness that was a legacy of the Clinton era.

    Bush II’s response to 9/11 was to once again unleash the counterterrorist dogs of war. I just hope that Obama is wise enough to see the difference. Despite all the arguments about Obama’s trying to sweet talk the Muslim world and this business about the Gitmo detainees, I do see some initial signs of wisdom, namely the decision to fight in Afghanistan; the pressure put on the Pakistanis to keep up their end of the fight; the current push, along with material and intelligence assistance, to get the Yemenis to go after and end the al-Qaeda cancer on their own turf; and his decisions to continue with such tactics as the use of our Predator drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I will not jump on Obama for a single incident like the near miss in Detroit. Sometimes these things just happen no matter what you do or try to do to prevent it. I WILL, however, watch his larger policy trends on counterterrorism and national security, as well as how effectively he responds to the obvious gaps in our defenses, before I start to fill in the blanks on his report card. I will admit that I do not like this man for numerous political reasons but I also have to say that this fight against terrorism is bigger than politics and one place where none of us can wish for anything but success.

  43. Rick Bentley

    “George Bush was relentlessly criticized for spending 7 minutes finishing a book he was reading to schoolchildren on 9/11”

    What he SHOULD be criticized for is the absence of leadership in the next 10 hours – staying up in the air like a coward while the nation sat and absent-mindedly watched the crash footage 1001 times.

  44. Emma

    “but I also have to say that this fight against terrorism is bigger than politics and one place where none of us can wish for anything but success.”

    Absolutely. But can he rise above politics when the Congress and Senate has split so definitively along party lines on almost every other issue? Every party-line vote, like healthcare and likely cap and trade, tells me it will all be business as usual. I hope not.

  45. And where is the permanent boss of TSA? His appointment has not been confirmed yet. Held up by partisan politics. Sen. DeMint has union fear.
    http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tsa29-2009dec29,0,3060401.story
    Would the underwear bomber been stopped? Who knows. However, having a boss might help TSA. Meanwhile though, we can blame Napolitano.

    The FBI and CIA have a long history of rivalry and undercutting each other. I would venture to say not even Ronald Reagan or Bush I can alter that nonsense. It is engrained in the system.

    Probably none of these things have jack to do with what happened in the air on Christmas Day. We need to start looking at why all the don’t flies/visas/gobbledeegook lists don’t all talk to one and other. Do we have a software problem, then fix it. Leave Bush, Obama likes and dislikes out of it.

  46. Wolverine

    Rick — I do not think that #44 is a valid criticism of Bush II. How can one state that it was an “absence of leadership”? Air Force One is a command center which is activated every time the President is aboard. He can receive information and issue orders as if he was in the Oval Office. Moreover, when you are under sudden attack and do not as yet have a total understanding of the scope of that attack, you take care to preserve the life of the single leader and decision-maker. What would be the point of putting that leader in danger just to demonstrate that he is not a coward?

    I can speak for myself only, but my reaction to those hours in the air was that the Secret Service was doing its job and the President was doing his, without the risk of standing on the edge of the trench so the enemy gunners could take an accurate bead on him. I think the American people should be able to understand that concept. In this highly technical world of ours, the President is a leader on the job whether he is in the White House, aboard Air Force One, at Camp David, or vacationing in Hawaii.

    Criticizing Bush II in this instance would be like slamming Eisenhower for not being physically with the first wave of men who landed on the beaches of Normandy or slamming FDR for ordering MacArthur to get out of Corregidor. A leader can demonstrate bravery by visibly leading the troops into battle but of what use to us is a brave, dead leader? King Harold was a brave man. But when he took that arrow in the eye at Hastings in 1066, the Saxon world died as well.

  47. Emma

    Rick, where do you suggest Bush should physically have been on 9/11?

  48. A PW County Resident

    @Moon-howler

    Actually, M-H, I wouldn’t get too caught up in the politics game. It took 8 months for the President to send the nomination. The Senator asked about unionizing TSA in a letter in October and when no answer came (even after 2 months), he put a hold on the nomination just as numerous Senators (democrat and republican) have done over the years to force an answer. It doesn’t prevent the nomination, it merely opens the question to a vote and debate rather than having a vote by unanimous consent. But the Majority Leader has not schedule a vote on the nomination. So who is holding it up? And because they don’t want to debate a union issue?

    I don’t really have a position on the union issues as I could go either way.

    I can assure you that after over 30 years working for a Federal agency, the lack of a permanent head does not have much effect. Generally nominees are consulted when they are awaiting confirmation and some are actually hired as “consultants.” Besides, the real decisions will be made by the people who have been there a long time. There is a transition period while the nominee gets the feet wet. Also, the new head generally would defer to the National Security Council, who should be calling the shots in this instance.

    I would be more concerned about why the State Department, which has had permanent leadership all year, did not act as strongly as it appears it should have. I see the fault as being more with them than DHS or TSA.

  49. Rick Bentley

    I don’t begrudge Bush taking AIr Force One out of town. But at some point before 10 hours he should have touched down and acknowledged the rest of us.

    But he didn’t know what to say. He was running scared. He thought he’d be held accountable for not taking AL Quaida seriously – for sitting on a report that said they would try to use planes as weapons, for spending 40% or so of his Presidency so far at his ranch.

    Prince Bandar met with him at the White House a couple of nights later and helped him find his direction – to distract Americans from what had happened by attacking Iraq. There were other reasons to do that also – reasons to do with oil, reasons to do with transforming the Middle East – but I’m sure a big motivator was to give us all a common enemy to hate rather than to let us dwell on the failure of Bush and Rice to fulfill their missions.

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