Feb 09 2010
Liberals Whine About Political Heat On National Security, Then Claim Christmas Day Bombing Attempt A US Success
President Bush had to tolerate years of ridiculous claims that he was listening in on the mad ravings of the liberal left when in fact he was following up on NSA leads that had detected people in America in contact with known terrorists overseas. It was a political hatchet job initiated by a false report in the NY Times (proven false because the article claimed the Bush administration was bypassing the FISA Court, when in fact it changed the rules so the FISA Court would review evidence from NSA intercepts).
The exposure of these changes in our antiquated laws – laws which helped al Qaeda succeed on 9-11, and which have been now codified into law three times by congress – handicapped our ability to detect and stop terrorist attacks. It was a political hit job on the Bush administration by liberal zealots – plain and simple.
The liberal fanatics followed this up by exposing a financial tracking program between the US and the world to follow terrorist money. It was a treasonous act, which went silent the moment the left realized they had gone too far and this was a sincere and needed program.
Then there was the exposure of detentions systems and rendition sites where we moved and questioned key enemy combatants we picked up on the battlefields. There was the whining about GITMO and the treatment of mass murderers when some water got on a Koran. Bush put up with years of fanatic, political nonsense form the left as he protected this nation from another 9-11.
Which is all the more reason this crap from a whiny Obama bot pisses me off:
Politics should never get in the way of national security. But too many in Washington are now misrepresenting the facts to score political points, instead of coming together to keep us safe.
This is from one John Brennan, a man who openly claimed during the last election as a member of Obama’s team that we were investigating too many potential leads here in the US, and needed to dial back our sensitivity to threats and not use the FISA process to investigate every little lead.
You can find my previous posts on this liberal zealot here, here and here – but this is the money quote from this man who planned to experiment with our lives to test his political theories:
To me, I think the government does have the right and the obligation to ensure the security and safety of its citizens. If there is probable cause, reasonable suspicion, about the involvement of a U.S. person in something, the government needs to have the ability to understand what the nature of that involvement is. The threshold for that type of government access can be high or can be low, and it [the probable cause threshold] needs to be somewhere in the middle.
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You don’t want to just troll and with a large net just pull up everything. There are technologies available to pulse the data set and pull back only that which has some type of correlation to your predicate [the probable cause threshold].
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I would argue the government needs to have access to only those nuggets of information that have some kind of predicate. That way the government can touch it and pull back only that which is related. It’s like a magnet, set to a certain calibration. That’s what I think we need to go to.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the threshold, quite frankly, was low, because we didn’t know the nature of the threat we faced here in the U.S.
[Post 9-11] Every effort was made by the government to try to get as much understanding and visibility into what else might be out there that’s going to hurt us again. Now that a number of years have passed, we need to make sure the calibration is important.
It is clear from the Ft Hood Massacre and the Christmas Day Bombing attempt that Brennan, Holder and Obama succeeded in implementing their plan to be less reactive to every possible lead. They set the warning sensor to the ‘middle’ and it missed two very dangerous individuals as a result.
Brennan is out fighting for his life now because he and Holder have been trying to make the claim they had permission from all over the intel community and from the GOP congress to lawyer up Abdulmutallab. As Doug Ross notes – someone is lying.
Brennan has to be desperate to cover his tracks by taking on Congressional leaders in the House an Senate. Only a fool calls congressional leaders essentially liars – and the GOP leaders are challenging Brennan.
Republican lawmakers are denying a charge made by top White House counterterrorism official John Brennan that they were briefed about — and did not object to — the decision to offer full American constitutional rights to accused Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
On “Meet the Press,” Brennan said that on Christmas night, just hours after Abdulmutallab tried to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253, Brennan called GOP Senators Mitch McConnell and Christopher Bond, as well as Republican Representatives John Boehner and Peter Hoekstra, and told them that Abdulmutallab was in FBI custody. “None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point,” Brennan said. “They didn’t say, Is he going into military custody? Is he going to be Mirandized?”
Each of the lawmakers strongly denies Brennan’s account.
Brennan has just opened the door for Congressional hearings. And I am sure AG Holder will be called to testify too, since he also attempted to claim GOP concurrence when he briefed them on the situation – almost two weeks later on January 5th!
The problem the Obama administration has is they allowed to attackers through. I was listening to Brennan this weekend on Meet The Press and was shocked at the lies flowing from this man’s lips. He claimed all worked well on Christmas Day – right back to the Napolitano nonsense that the ‘system worked’:
The key point comes at the 2:00 minute mark where Brennan pretends all is well with our national security (from the transcript – emphasis mine):
MR. BRENNAN: Ever since 9/11, al-Qaeda and bin Laden have been determined to follow through on its earlier attacks here in the homeland. We have destructed numerous attempts to carry out those attacks here. They are continuing to train those operatives, they are using different areas of the world. We see most recently with Mr. Abdulmutallab that Yemen has become an area where al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is attempting to launch those attacks. So the intelligence is strong that they are continuing to focus on the homeland. But at the same time, our counterterrorism successes take place every day. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anybody that al-Qaeda is attempting to carry out an attack. They are continuing to have that as one of their priorities. But we’ve been able to thwart their plans.
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MR. BRENNAN: Well, we have to stay more than one step ahead of al-Qaeda, and I think we’ve been able to do that. We have increased our security capabilities across the board. We’re working very closely with our partners. They are looking at new technologies. We are enhancing our screening procedures in the aviation sector as well as other areas. So we are continuing to look at the types of developments and evolution that they are going through so that we can thwart those attacks. And we have been very, very successful.
The System Works! Abdulmutallab was able to nearly blow 300 people to pieces in the skies above Detriot, MI and this tool is claiming they have been “very, very successdul”? Who would of thunk the Administration would be so arrogant as to claim the Christmas Day Bombing near miss to be a success!
How dumb are these people? Brennan went further in this next clip and first tries to claim they used processes from the Bush era (wrong, Bush had OTHER avenues he also used) and then claims they are looking to strengthen these old processes. Which is it dude?
Around 2:00 minutes in Brennan ‘tires’ of national security being a political issue. What a crock. National Security (and the failures thereof) are of course political issues. They are life and death issues and if you screw up we have legal and political recourse to change managers. Does he prefer the legal avenue?
The kicker starts at the 4:00 minute mark in the second clip. Brennan admits he called congressional leaders and said Abdulmutallab was ‘in custody’ and ‘cooperating’. Which means he called before AG Holder decided to Mirandize and lawyer up this enemy combatant – e.g., when he stopped cooperating.
Brennan seems to think ‘in custody’ means ‘mirandized’ – but early reports on the sequence of events noted the FBI has an allowed exception to hold and interrogate WITHOUT mirandizing in cases of national security! Is Brennan too dumb to know what was reported or is he misleading the American people?
Either way what he said is misleading at best and false at its core. But at least now he has demonstrated why we need congressional hearings.
Obama is a twit … Allahu Akbar
The Obama Administration had previously made statements that to ensure there was no harsh treatment that all interviews of “high value targets” would be done by the FBI, instead of the CIA.
So, even if Brennan had told GOP leaders that the FBI was interviewing Abdulmutallab, there was no reason for the GOP leaders to infer that this “high value target” had been mirandized.
So the DNI can sit there on Meet the Press and tell lies to the American people and it is OK with Obama and Holder, as long as they think their ass is covered?
Don’t tell me about politicizing intelligence when the Dems spent 8 years politicizing every secret they got their hands on. The difference between now and then, Bush never stooped so low as to give away secrets to protect himself at the expense of America’s safety or the safety of his agents. A few weeks after 911, Hillary asked, “What did President Bush know and when did he know it?” That was the first shot and it went down hill from there.
Is Brennan too dumb to know he is lying? Yes, he didn’t even know that his agency hadn’t stood up it’s interrogation unit, but he did know that the old one was disbanded because the evil Bush had to be wiped off the map.
CORRECTION…. Brennan is National Security Advisor, not DNI.
I guess that when the nuclear weapons start going off, then we will have crossed that threshold. Yea, and a few others at the same time.