When you promise the gullible you can turn them all into TV-Land princes and princesses, and that world-wide Nirvana is one election away, you should expect a serious backlash when your facade of infinite wisdom and power comes crashing down to expose the experienced and impotent human being behind the curtain. I have never seen such a realistic versi0n of the Wizard of Oz fantasy in my entire life than the spectacular failures of the liberal/progressive Democrats these last two years they wielded power. It has truly illustrated the naiveté of the denizens of Oz (aka the Democrat left).

More so because the failures stem from the left finally passing their policies – and watching them crash and burn due to their overly simplistic and not well thought out ramifications. We had to pass these vacuous and vague policies in order to learn what would happen –  instead of knowing ahead time. These people had no real clue, they just felt really strongly they were purer than everyone else, thus their solutions had to be superior! And now they have left our economy in ruins and their plans are on a path to destroy everyone’s health care options. Not to mention the generations of debt they have saddled this country with. They were superior – superiorly bad.

So of course, now that we see the messy sausage the lofty liberal/progressive types have conjured up in reality, everyone is beginning to jump ship. Even more interesting is the fact the left did not get true socialist Nirvana, where they tell everyone else how to live, what to speak and think – so they are the ones most ‘depressed’ (verses energized):

WHY, asks a Democrat leading a training session for fellow activists, doesn’t “Yes we can” work as a slogan any more? “Because we haven’t,” a jaded participant responds. Progressives, as bedrock Democrats like to call themselves, are despondent. The election euphoria of 2008, when their party secured heavy majorities in both chambers of Congress and Barack Obama won the presidency with ease, has deflated so rapidly that analysts are now diagnosing on the left an affliction they ascribed to the Republicans back then: an “enthusiasm gap”.

The present gap is really more of a chasm. Gallup, a pollster, reckons that a mere 28% of Democrats are “very enthusiastic” about voting, compared to 44% of Republicans. By the same token the Pew Research Centre found in June that only 37% of liberal Democrats were “more enthusiastic than usual” about going to the polls, compared with 59% of conservative Republicans. And according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll the same month, the categories of voters whose interest in elections has dimmed the most since the last one are liberals and those who voted for Mr Obama (see chart). “You can’t deny the level of disappointment,” says Raul Grijalva, a Democratic representative from Arizona and head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Depressed? Because the country is not mesmerized by their virtues, grace and wisdom? Or are they depressed because they failed to remake the world into their own Walter-Mitty images (because the world refused to comply)? They must be wondering why is there still war, why is Iran still arming itself with deadly nuclear weapons and killing its citizens? Why is the country still under attack from radical Islamic Fascists? Why didn’t the economy respond to the government’s magic wand? Why is there no global warming (unless you ‘adjust’ and cherry pick the data)? Why, why, why …?

The hardest thing for a zealot to admit is the possibility they were ‘wrong’. Worse, to admit that their simple minded views of how things work are inadequate to the true complexities of the universe and reality. But I think it is starting to sink in to the left that at least they have figured out America is not impressed, and is about to make that sentiment absolutely clear. They see their hopes slipping away, and finally the message from America is sinking in – somewhat.

CNN released an analysis showing 2010 is shaping up just like 1994, the last time the left took a political pasting in the polls:

When it comes to the political landscape three months before the midterm elections take place, is everything that’s old new again?

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey paints a picture that is markedly similar to that of August, 1994, when few people predicted that in only three short months the Republican Party would snatch 54 seats from the Democrats and wrestle control of the House from the beleaguered party.

Sixteen years later, Republican candidates for Congress have a three-point advantage in the “generic ballot” question – virtually the same position they held at the same time in 1994. President Obama has an all-time high disapproval rating almost on par with that of Bill Clinton’s 16 years ago. And Republican voters are feeling an intense amount of anger over the state of the nation – the same motivating force that the GOP relied on in 1994.

In 1994 the nation was coming out of a mild recession and entering a period of economic heaven and world peace (since the Berlin Wall had fallen and al Qaeda’s hate was being notably ignored after the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing). The economic and world backdrop in 2010 is drastically different. The nation is not coming out of a recession but entering its second year (and maybe second economic dip) as the liberal stimulus policies failed so miserably – and expectedly. And the world has not started humming ‘We Are The World” in perfect unison either. In fact, our nation has experienced more attacks on its shores in the last two years than all the other years since 9/11.

The political tsunami building now in 2010 is much bigger than the one that hit the left in 1994. This time they did get their way and pass leftist policies. They did bankrupt the nation – and produced no economic stimulus. This time they did bribe their way in Congress to destroy our health care plans to the point states are rising up in mass protest. This time they did have their Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, and were seen even more incompetent than President Bush. This time the left sued a state for enforcing immigration laws this country demands be enforced.

The liberals laid bare their true cores this time, they had to in order to make more progress than 1993-1994. And, as in 1994, the nation is rejecting them. But this time the rejection will be monumental. Because this time the stakes are higher, the general environment and mood of the electorate is much worse and the evidence of liberal/progressive mistakes is unambiguously clear. This will not be 1994. Just ask Senators Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray, Russ Feingold, to name a few progressives trying to not be drowned in the coming wave.

Update: Kimberley Strassel at WSJ has discovered some hard to refute evidence that this fall’s backlash is aimed directly at the liberal pols and their failed policies:

Troll through the voting rolls, and you’ll find an exclusive club of three House Democrats running for re-election who voted against the more controversial pieces of the Obama agenda: the $862 billion stimulus, Mr. Obama’s $3.5 trillion budget, cap and trade and, of course, ObamaCare. Troll through the polls today, and you’ll find a near-exclusive club of three House Democrats who are beating every electoral expectation. Were history, incumbency and the economy the main factors this fall, Idaho’s Walt Minnick, Alabama’s Bobby Bright and Mississippi’s Gene Taylor would be packing up. That they aren’t is a resounding statement on a failed Obama vision.

So they only 3 Democrats in deep red states not feeling the voters’ wrath are the same three who opposed the signature liberal disasters. QED.

One thing that has bothered me throughout the recent incidents of terrorism inside the United States on President Obama’s watch is why more people are not raising alarm bells on how dysfunctional our national security has become? Where are those dedicated souls whose primary goal in life is protecting this nation from harm?

I have documented a timeline of screw ups and missteps inside the Obama administration as it attempted to dial back our nation’s sensitivity to potential terrorist attacks. Basically, in the early months of 2009, the liberals inside the Obama administration created excuses NOT to investigate terrorist leads. All of this was tied to the issue of GITMO and detaining enemy combatants vs. mirandizing terrorists.

We have seen the result of these 2009 discussions as AG Holder mirandized the terrorists involved with the Ft Hood Massacre, the nearly successful Christmas Day Bombing over the skies of Detroit and the bungled Times Square bombing. Since October we have seen 1 successful attack and two near misses (which only failed due to incompetence by the terrorists and quick thinking by nearby civilians), yet still the Obama administration refuses to admit it is using the wrong policies for the threats we face. And then there is this deathly silence inside the national security organizations (or a news media muzzle).

When dealing with terrorists you have to have an overarching coherent (if not suicidal) policy. Therefore what is determined for enemy combatants impacts surveillance efforts. If people of suspicion are not enemies of war to be detained, they become simple criminals with a higher level of protection of their rights. Protection which is implemented by higher requirements for determining probable cause. How we as a nation legally react is dictated by the environment and conditions surrounding the incidents.

In war time we have a hair trigger on threats, and we are fast and brutal in our response, a response usually determined on the battlefield in real time (its war after all). In tense and dangerous times (or situations) we have a hair trigger to threats, but we are careful to focus our preemptive strike to the source of the threat and allow for some deliberation and checks. In peace time we are slow and deliberate, assuming little threat to our nation, giving all sorts of time and benefit of the doubt to the accused. These are the legal cadences we have established and operated under for two centuries. They are mutually exclusive and were not meant to be mixed (e.g., we did not Mirandize Hiroshima).

What Holder, Obama and others are attempting to do is use the wrong response (peace time deliberation) on the battlefield and as a replacement to preemptive actions on major threats. It is  their total ignorance of why we have these escalating responses – which of course is to protect this nation and its people – which entices them to make boneheaded decisions they make.

Last year, as I noted in the post above, Team Obama began to restrict when we would use our hair triggers and when we would use the slow due process of the courts:

With the president’s directions in hand, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department came back on March 13, 2009, with a more modest position than Mr. Bush had advanced. It told Judge Bates that the president could detain without trial only people who were part of Al Qaeda or its affiliates, or their “substantial” supporters.

…

There was broad agreement that the law of armed conflict allowed the United States to detain as wartime prisoners anyone who was actually a part of Al Qaeda, as well as nonmembers who took positions alongside the enemy force and helped it. But some criticized the notion that the United States could also consider mere supporters, arrested far away, to be just as detainable without trial as enemy fighters.

What this meant was lots of marginally or distantly related allies could not be determined to be enemy combatants – there protections went up and our risk went up. That was especially true for American traitors like Anwar al Aulaqi, who is tied to all three attacks since last October. To act preemptively meant the government had to have already proven the suspect was a terrorist – which was impossible in the cases of Hasan, Abdulmutallab and Shahzad.

This insane determination actually lines up well with pre-election comments by Holder, and especially by Obama’s terrorism advisor John Brennan:

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.

The wording is classic bureaucrat babbling, but it has a meaning. It meant Brennan, Holder and Obama concluded they knew enough about the threat to adjust our early warning network to be much less sensitive and intrusive on suspects. They were arrogantly wrong. Their changes introduced openings that al Qaeda and its allies exploited with surreal success.

Which brings me to the recent Senate Intelligence Committee Report that outlined 14 screw ups made on President Obama’s watch in light of the three terrorist attacks. To assess this kind of report one really has to understand how federal reports and proclamations are created. This aids in seeing the wispy hidden context bureaucrats are loathe to clearly state on the record. Bureaucrats hate to point fingers too much, because they all know they live in glass houses. It is like a den of thieves and their code of honor – never to turn on one of their own.

Each of the 14 conclusions in the report has a hidden context,  a context not obvious to someone outside the government but completely visible to those who wrote the report. Which means the shape and form of the context are there for trained eyes to detect. I believe I can tease out some of this context (with unknown accuracy and precision).

So let’s look at what the report says in some key areas. Let’s begin with one of the conclusions made up front (top of page 3 – click to enlarge):

What the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence determined was the dots were there in the system. Some of these attacks were preventable. That is important because now what we need to understand is what barriers were stopping the connecting of dots. Was it policy and politics?

One of the the top findings in the senate report was the idea elements of the intelligence community should have put Christmas Day Bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the No Fly Lists. Here is that finding (click to enlarge):

But this finding is completely at odds with the testimony of the IC community, specifically the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC):

• Before the September 11 terrorist attacks, intelligence databases and watchlisting systems were badly disjointed. They were neither interoperable nor broadly accessible and, as a result, two of the hijackers – although known to parts of the U.S. Government in late-1999, were not watchlisted until late-August 2001.
• To fix that systemic problem, the U.S. Government implemented Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 (HSPD-6) in the Fall of 2003. Under the construct of HSPD-6, all collectors would provide information on known and suspected terrorists (except purely domestic terrorists) to NCTC which maintains a TOP SECRET database called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE). Every night a FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY extract of TIDE is provided to the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) to support all U.S. Government screening operations.
  • The determination of what information is passed from TIDE to the TSC is governed by the “reasonable suspicion” standard which describes the minimum derogatory information for inclusion on the consolidated watchlist.
  • That criteria, approved by the Deputies Committee in the Fall of 2008, notes that “individuals described as militants, extremists, jihadists, etc should not be nominated without particularized derogatory information.”
  • The implementing instructions further state “those who only associate with known or suspected terrorists, but have done nothing to support terrorism” are ineligible for the No Fly List (NFL) or Selectee List (SL).

Based on this Abdulmutallab could not be on the list until after he committed and act of terrorism. What we see in the NCTC testimony is a very clear statement of what changed – and when – between the Bush administration and the Obama administration. What is obvious here is that, as it became clear Obama would win (and Bush was out in any case), the liberals inside the national security organizations (of which Brennan is a close brethren) began making the changes Brennan and Obama clearly indicated they would accept and support. These first changes were agreed to in the Fall of 2008!

It was no longer sufficient to be a known as or be a self proclaimed “militants, extremists, jihadists, etc“. There had to be some other evidence. Worse yet, “those who only associate with known or suspected terrorists, but have done nothing to support terrorism” (YET!) were not allowed to be put on the the more serious watch lists.

Now I understand the dead silence and the apparent circling of the wagons in the Intelligence Community. These people colluded with team Obama to dismantle our defenses, and were so excited by the idea they began doing the dismantling before Obama took his oath of office.

It is no secret factions inside the national security organizations were at war with the Bush administration. From Joe Wilson’s lame attempt to use his wife’s knowledge of forged Nigerian documents to create the false claim President Bush concocted intelligence to support the Iraq war, to the traitors who outed the changes to NSA and FISA to the NY Times, incorrectly claiming Bush was bypassing FISA (when in fact he forced FISA to accept NSA leads as legal probable cause) the war has waged. All through Bush’s presidency there was a radical element inside the national security and intelligence community who tried to influence elections and scar President Bush. Sadly there are plenty of useful idiots in the country we were glad to be play the naive puppets.

But what is now abundantly clear is that this same community of liberal zealots changed our national security posture – changes supported by President Obama, AG Holder and advisor Brennan. The one person on the inside who did not support these changes has now been fired by Obama.

I will have further posts on the SSCI report given this new perspective, but let’s be clear. The liberals zealots in the intelligence community are in cahoots with the liberals in Congress and the White House, and they all have taken actions which led to the deaths of many Americans and the near deaths of hundreds of others.

They have put this nation at risk, and there needs to be an investigation to make sure zealots can never risk American lives again without being responsible for their idiotic actions.

Update: In a related story, no one wants to lead the dysfunctional intelligence community, which is no surprise. Who would want to take the blame for all the future results that will hit us because of all these past mistakes?

Update: Rep Pete Hoekstra sees it the same way I do – a lone voice in the wilderness:

“Right now, the Obama administration’s national security apparatus is broken, dysfunctional and in disarray,” Hoekstra said.  “Dennis Blair was the one person you could count on for rationality among Holder, Napolitano and Brennan—and he’s the one the president let go.”

The Bush administration was raked over the coals, unfairly in my opinion, for recognizing how our national security guidelines allowed terrorists free reign once inside our borders prior to 9-11, and for taking steps to correct this deadly problem. The left-wing nuts went ape over the changes President Bush instituted, changes which required the Attorney General to request special, short term surveillance powers to ensure people here in the US or US citizens abroad, who are in contact with previously identified terrorists, were not planning or executing deadly attacks inside our borders. The changes to the NSA-FISA relationship, which I have discussed ad nauseam since the NY Times’ traitorous act of disclosing these changes (with complete falsehoods and hype), also require judicial branch review every 90 days. Each 90 day period the Attorney General had to demonstrate why there was sufficient probable-cause evidence to warrant the special scrutiny our national security agencies can bring to bear.

Also note that this completely legal act (now law per Congress) was set up with numerous checks and balances, judicial review and congressional oversight and reporting. The left were all up in arms because they feared somehow their nattering ramblings would be used for political benefit – a completely unfounded and paranoid view.

But here we are today with the Obama administration thwarting the constitution and this nation’s laws in a manner that makes the act of surveillance pale in comparison. The Obama administration has issued an assassination order on a US citizen, one Anwar al Aulaqi. Al Aulaqi is a radicalized cleric living in Yemen and tied to three recent terrorist attacks here in the US (Ft Hood, the Christmas Day Bombing attempt, the Times Square Bombing attempt). While I see al Aulaqi as a treasonous enemy combatant through his actions and words, the fact is he is still innocent until proven guilty in an open court of law by a jury of his peers.

And this is where the Obama administration is simply trampling our constitution and laws. If the administration wants to put a hit order out on al Aulaqi, they need to try and convict him in a court of law for crimes worthy of the death penalty. Only through the determination by a jury of al Aulaqi’s peers – we average Americans, as much as that relationship disgusts us – can a death warrant against a US citizen be deemed appropriate.

Folks, we are now on the slippery slope to oblivion. We need to stand up and stop this order and give this man due process. He was not captured on the battlefield, so he is not going to fall into the detention/interrogation bucket of cases being debated. If the Obama administration has proof of his treason and the threat  he poses as the basis of the assassination order, then bring it to court and convict the man.

What I don’t want to see is precedence established here, where any old political leader can determine in secrecy that a US Citizen is a threat and then have them eliminated without due process or cause. Hitler and all other murderous leaders throughout history were given this kind of supreme power, and the results have always been a horrific disaster of epic human carnage. Once we remove our protections for one individual, or allow them to be circumvented in the heat of a moment of panic, then we lose them for all time.

I implore the leaders in Congress to stop this madness and call on the administration to try al Aulaqi in absentia and obtain a conviction and death sentence for his crimes. Then, once he is no longer innocent but proven guilty, the means of his execution can be considered in light of the circumstances of the man’s crimes and his threat to our nation. But not before hand, not in the America my father fought to protect during World War II, or the one my son signed up to protect as a United States Marine. We have not fought our way as a nation for 200+ years as we reached the pinnacle of human achievement and freedom to just throw it away on the hasty whim of a power-mad individual.

We are more than that. We used to be better than this.

Hold the presses! The United States Attorney General, Eric Holder, has made a mind boggling discovery this past week and he went on the Sunday morning talk shows to share this historic insight with the American people:

Mr. Holder acknowledged the abrupt shift of tone, characterizing the administration’s stance as a “new priority” and “big news” in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“We’re now dealing with international terrorists,” he said, …

Just amazing – who would have thought 10 years after 9-11 and nearly 20 years after the first bombing incident at the World Trade Center in NY City that this very important discovery would finally be uncovered by this young and inexperienced administration? Should we all now applaud – or weep?

In fact, what AG Holder did this weekend was a backhanded and lame effort to acknowledge this administration’s approach to national security has been a bloody (no pun intended) disaster. They have finally realized that the Taliban and al Qaeda fascists in Pakistan and Afghanistan are really serious about destroying the West:

The conclusion that Mr. Shahzad was involved in an international plot appeared to come from investigations that began after his arrest and interrogation, including inquiries into his links with the Taliban in Pakistan.

“We know that they helped facilitate it,” Mr. Holder said of the Times Square bombing attempt. “We know that they helped direct it. And I suspect that we are going to come up with evidence which shows that they helped to finance it. They were intimately involved in this plot.”

…

Mr. Brennan [the President's antiterrorism advisor] appeared to say even more definitively than Mr. Holder did that the Taliban in Pakistan had provided money as well as training and direction.

“He was trained by them,” Mr. Brennan said. “He received funding from them. He was basically directed here to the United States to carry out this attack.”

He added: “We have good cooperation from our Pakistani partners and from others. We’re learning more about this incident every day.

From what I am seeing from Holder, as he now agrees Mirandizing terrorists caught attempting mass murder inside the US is not a great idea, is the dawning of reality. After years of claiming law enforcement can stop Islamo Fascist warfare from reaching our shores, Holder is now all about fixing law enforcement because it ain’t working all that great. Why not just admit we are at war and we don’t go to war with judges and lawyers on point? Doh!

Mark Steyn really nails the whole mess playing out in DC with this blistering review of the incompetence on display in DC. Some exceptionally biting excerpts:

Last year, not one but two “terrorism task forces” discovered that U.S. Army psychiatrisat Nidal Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with the American-born, Yemeni-based cleric Ayman al-Awlaki but concluded that this was consistent with the major’s “research interests,” so there was nothing to worry about. A few months later, Major Hasan gunned down dozens of his comrades while standing on a table shouting “Allahu Akbar!” That was also consistent with his “research interests,” by the way. A policy of relying on stupid jihadists to screw it up every time will inevitably allow one or two to wiggle through. Hopefully not on a nuclear scale.

…

And, whenever the marshmallow illusions are momentarily discombobulated, the entire political-media class rushes forward to tell us that the thwarted killer was a “lone wolf,” an “isolated extremist.” According to Mayor Bloomberg a day or two before Shahzad’s arrest, the most likely culprit was “someone who doesn’t like the health-care bill” (that would be me, if your SWAT team’s at a loose end this weekend). Even after Shahzad’s arrest, the Associated Press, CNN, and the Washington Post attached huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments. Just as, after Major Hasan, the “experts” effortlessly redefined “post-traumatic stress disorder” to apply to a psychiatrist who’d never been anywhere near a war zone, so now the housing market is the root cause of terrorism: Subprime terrorism is a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I- and ending in -slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit?

This well deserved derision comes about because the liberal fools in the Obama administration had a elementary-school-level grasp of what it takes to defend this great country. They thought ‘how hard could it be’? It works so well on TV!

Three successful attacks later (two of which only failed due to faulty detonators) and team Obama is cheering its successes. This transcript of Holder on ABC’s This Week is particularly nauseating:

HOLDER: Well, there certainly was a bit of that, but I think also one has to look at the overall operation. He was stopped before he was able to leave the country [AJStrata: but after depositing is WMD] because of a notification that the FBI made to put him on the no-fly list. We also had vigilant citizens who looked at that vehicle that he left and saw the smoke coming out and notified the appropriate authorities.

This was, in some ways, I think, a good example of what an aroused American populace, coupled with a vigilant law enforcement community, can actually do.

I wonder how well AG Holder will support the ‘aroused’ American populace this fall, as they head to the voting booth to begin rolling back our young president’s mistakes and missteps? Or how about this truly moronic interchange:

TAPPER: OK, Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud of the Pakistani — Pakistani Taliban appeared in a video last month saying the time is very near when a Fedayeen, or soldiers, will attack the American states in the major cities. At the time that he issued that warning, U.S. policymakers didn’t think the Pakistani Taliban had the ability to reach into the United States. They were, obviously, wrong?

HOLDER: Well, I’m not sure that we didn’t think they had that ability. We didn’t think that necessarily was their aim. We certainly have seen with the Shahzad incident that they have not only the aim, but the capability of doing that. And that’s why they have taken on, I think, a new significance in our anti-terror fight.

What kind of idiot dismisses an open threat of pending attack by using the rationale ‘we did not think they meant what they said”? Is this not an admission of total incompetence? The man should be fired for this kind of foolish thinking! You mean the Taliban and al Qaeda really do want to murder Americans in mass numbers? Whodathunkit!

At one point Holder was accidentally enlightening (and damning of this administration’s effort):

TAPPER: Shahzad was on a Treasury Department watch list since the late 1990s for bringing large sums of cash into this country. He was taken off that watch list. Did the U.S. government drop the ball?

HOLDER: No, I don’t think so. I think we have done a good job in monitoring those people who we need to identify as potential threats to the, you know, government, and I think one has to understand that in connection with the — the resolution of this plot, American law enforcement I think was very successful.

Emphasis mine. What a strange and contorted statement? One supposedly well rehearsed for this weekend’s marathon propaganda push. Was the government limiting its surveillance to potential threats to the government and ignoring threats to the American people? How could letting another mad jihadist train for months in Pakistan and successfully park a massive explosive in Times Square be called ‘very successful’? Is this man mentally all there?

Team Obama has established enough prima facia evidence of criminal incompetence and neglect with the three terrorist attacks that slipped by their legal-eagle eyes in just one short year in office. When a new Congress is seated next year, priority one has to be investigating the madness inside this administration that now goes for ‘national security’. Right now we are not a nation secured, we are a nation exposed to death and harm by the incompetent decisions of a few left-wing zealots in DC.

As we learn more and more about Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square Bomber who is also a naturalized American citizen, we also are seeing signs that something is going horribly wrong inside the classified halls of the Obama administration’s war on terrorists. As I noted in previous posts, news reports that emerged since the Ft Hood bombing and Christmas Day bombing attempt late least year show a pattern that indicates AG Holder (presumably with the backing of the President) began to roll back surveillance of suspects with potential terrorist ties. It was part and parcel of the debate to close GITMO and focus our national security efforts only on certain regions and people with established ties to terrorist groups. New leads were to be treated differently, and Bush era investigations were to be shut down.

The term ‘lone wolf’ was created to indicate the new rules for triggering surveillance, with higher levels of firm evidence required beyond simple communications. These would be applied to new suspects who wandered into the surveillance nets – those that stayed up. And American citizens appear to be designated off limits from any scrutiny – bringing us back to the barriers that allowed the 9-11 high jackers free reign once inside our borders.

The nexus of the last three attacks (Ft Hood, Christmas Day bomber and now Times Square bomber) appears to be American citizen turned traitor Anwar al Aulaqi. As the NY Times notes today, he is the common ‘red dot’ connecting all three incidents:

It is no surprise to counterterrorism officials to find that an accused terrorist had been influenced by Mr. Awlaki, 39, now hiding in Yemen, who has emerged as perhaps the most prominent English-speaking advocate of violent jihad against the United States.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration took the extraordinary step of authorizing the killing of Mr. Awlaki, making him the first American citizen on the Central Intelligence Agency’s hit list.

Mr. Awlaki’s English-language online lectures and writings have turned up in more than a dozen terrorism investigations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, counterterrorism experts have said. And in two recent United States cases, Mr. Awlaki communicated directly with the accused perpetrator.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November, exchanged about 18 e-mail messages with Mr. Awlaki in the year before the shootings, asking among other things whether it would be permissible under Islam to kill American soldiers preparing to fight in Afghanistan. After the shootings, Mr. Awlaki praised Major Hasan as “a hero” on his Web site, which was taken offline by the Internet host company shortly after the posting.

In addition, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic airliner on Christmas Day, is believed to have met Mr. Awlaki during his training by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

It is unclear whether Mr. Shahzad ever directly communicated with Mr. Awlaki.

What is stunning about this whole story is how apparently the surveillance of people tied to al Aulaqi were shut down last year. To me that indicates it was really the monitoring of al Aulaqi that was shutdown, causing a cascade of blindness related to anyone (like Major Hasan) tied to him. This effected surveillance actions and investigations initiated during the Bush administration and apparently active when team Obama took office. It was a horrible blunder which we know killed 14 people at Ft Hood and injured dozens of others.

In the following timeline (click to enlarge) we see how the Joint Terrorism Task Force investigations of Major Hasan was shutdown around the time it would require a mandated 90 day application to continue, and during a period when far left liberal voices were establishing far reaching limitations on who was to be considered a suspected enemy combatant (original post here).

It now appears that this adjustment in who was considered a potential risk vs lone wolf left the Obama administration blind to Umar Farouk Abdumutallab – the Christmas Day bomber – and now Shahzad.

An indication of how badly the Obama administration has been caught off guard is the historic assassination order now on al Aulaqi. As an American citizen, al Aulaqi is due a trial before he can be executed. I actually find the kill order disturbing and unconstitutional without a guilty verdict from a federal court in hand. This seems to be a panic reaction from Team Obama, to stop something soon no matter what the cost. It is there attempt at a Jack Bauer moment.

ABC News outlines a list of terrorist who’s who possibly connected to Shahzad.

But according to these sources, Shahzad also had a web of jihadist contacts that included big names tied to terror attacks in the U.S. and abroad, including the figure who has emerged as a central figure in many recent domestic terror attempts – radical American-born Muslim cleric Anwar Awlaki.

Besides Awlaki, sources say Shahzad was also linked to a key figure in the Pakistani Taliban, its Emir Beitullah Mehsud, who was killed in a drone missile strike in 2009. The Mehsuds had been family friends of Shahzad, who is the son of a former high-ranking Pakistani military officer.

Sources told ABC News that Shahzad was childhood friends with one of the alleged masterminds of the Mumbai massacre of 2008, in which more than 170 people died.

The question is, if these connections pan out, how is it our national intelligence missed all this? How could someone who had been under a JTTF investigation from 2004 not have his background connections like this unknown?

Andy McCarthy discusses another sign of total disarray inside the Obama administration, as it broadcasts all kinds of sensitive data in an attempt to appear to be on top of things:

[W]hat hasn’t been apparent until now is how news coverage of this story fundamentally changed the investigation. Law enforcement officials usually say they can’t talk to reporters about an ongoing investigation, but there were leaks in this case from the beginning — partly because of the dynamic between two powerful law enforcement forces in New York City….

Details about the Times Square investigation were all over the local newspapers, even as authorities were still trying to puzzle out who was responsible. Any element of surprise that law enforcement might have had was evaporating.

I posted on another incident were too much was being reported and only helping our enemies to succeed the next time by explaining how they failed this last time. All the details involving the phone trail have done nothing but provide a tutorial on how to better avoid detection in the future.

So why all the missed signs? Why all the leaked details of the investigation? Why the kill order on al Aulaqi when it appears last year his Free Speech rights were sacred as he and Hasan were talking about Jihad? It seems to me the Obama administration screwed up so badly when they closed down investigations last year that they see a time coming when they will need every bit if evidence they can muster to show they tried to be vigilant.

Update: The Washington Post has a review of what investigators have been able to discover as they review Shahzad’s history, a history that includes an investigation by a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in 2004 – though what was known then is not clear. Some disturbing details:

Shahzad’s transition “was a gradual thing that started years ago,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official with access to interrogation reports from the probe. “It wasn’t suddenly, ‘I found God, and this is the right path.’ There is a combination of religion and anger.”

The official noted that Shahzad had made at least a dozen return trips to Pakistan since arriving in the United States in 1999 and that the CIA’s campaign of Predator strikes and Pakistan’s recent military operations are focused on a part of the country very close to where Shahzad grew up.

Sadly, years ago Shahzad was being monitored by federal agents.  So his actions are not a surprise, and if someone had remained vigilant they might have detected this supposedly slow transition.

“We have nothing that is contradictory to what he is telling us,” said a senior Obama administration official, adding that undisclosed new information from Shahzad’s interrogation “sheds some light” on his motivation.

The investigation has turned up tenuous links between Shahzad and high-profile figures of jihad. A U.S. official said Shahzad was associated with at least one individual who was in contact with Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born cleric in Yemen who has been tied to the suspect in the attempted Christmas bombing on a Detroit-bound plane as well as the man charged in last year’s fatal shootings at Fort Hood, Tex.

The Post then goes on to say there was no direct contact detected so far. But to know someone who is in contact with al Aulaqi seems quite disturbing in itself. Who would associate with that kind of traitor? It’s not like al Aulaqi’s beliefs are secret – he has tons of web videos out.

Investigators are examining the significance of large sums of money that Shahzad brought into the United States. Between 1999 and 2008, Shahzad declared $80,000 in cash when he returned from various trips overseas, said another law enforcement official familiar with the investigation.

Well, there clearly is nothing suspicious about that!  Look at how the WaPo tried to find some way to make this all look harmless:

“Terrorists know banks are being watched, so are they moving bulk cash to finance their operations?” The official added that it is not unusual for immigrants — particularly those like Shahzad who come from well-heeled families overseas — to travel to the United States with stacks of currency.

What a blatant and nonsensical contradiction! Well heeled families also understand the concept of bank transfers so their children don’t get robbed of massive amounts of cash. What kind of pretzel logic (or lame excuse) is this? All I see is a bunch of incompetence or badly crafted spin.

Major Update Below!

As I posted yesterday, there was a disturbing blurb in a NY Times article that indicated Faisal Shahzad, the now infamous Times Square Bomber, was under surveillance as a potential terrorist during the Bush administration.

George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force [JTTF] interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply “checking everything out.”

JTTF’s typically surveillance an individual – especially a US Citizen – under the FIS Court authorization. These authorizations have to be renewed every 90 days or so by the US Attorney General. As has been noted before (see here, here and here for details) the Obama administration began shutting down Bush-era terrorists investigations last year as they debated how to reduce our nation’s surveillance of terrorists threats. The person who killed 14 people at Ft Hood last fall was one such suspect whose JTTF investigation was suspiciously shut down around this time last year.

There is more evidence which seems to point at changes made by the Obama administration in terms of their monitoring Mr. Shahzad. For example, after being on the terrorist watch list for almost a decade, Shahzad was removed from that list sometime after 2008, according to CBS News:

Sources tell CBS News that would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad appeared on a Department of Homeland Security travel lookout list – Traveler Enforcement Compliance System (TECS) – between 1999 and 2008 because he brought approximately $80,000 cash or cash instruments into the United States.

Major Update: Reader thfries notes this next bit is probably satire. I did was not able to get to the source story (still on travel with very narrow posting windows) so from here on I would ignore it. - end update

Now there is another damning tidbit out that confirms that Federal Investigators may have been blinded and hamstrung by the lack of FIS Court authorization to fully monitor this threat:

Taking great pains to explain how Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad was able to make it to JFK airport and board an Emirates airliner before being nabbed, authorities today said that they were following Mr. Shahzad, “but only on Twitter.”

A spokesman for the surveillance team following the suspected terrorist said that they were closely monitoring Mr. Shahzad’s tweets, “but he must have figured something out because all of a sudden he blocked us.”

The surveillance team’s revelations come on the heels of the Dept. of Homeland Security’s shocker that it had friended Mr. Shahzad on Facebook weeks ago and had even played the popular online game Farmville with him.

“A few days before the Times Square incident, Mr. Shahzad attempted to blow up one of our sheep,” a Department spokesman said. “In retrospect, that should have been a red flag.”

OK, why is this disturbing? Well Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are probably considered to be in the public domain, since individuals freely volunteer to communicate with others openly. It therefore may not require a FIS Court warrant to monitor. The idea someone could block government monitoring on Twitter using one of its privacy settings is another indication this was not a full up surveillance. The government can get past that little barrier.

The fact is someone was trying to keep and eye on Shahzad, but possibly without the full authority of the JTTF and FIS Court. Someone was trying to monitor this guy. Someone who may have disagreed with the decision to pull back from the Bush era level of concern. - end suspicious reference

I also don’t think this has the smell of a JTTF in progress given all the phone calls from America to Pakistan should have been detected by NSA, and that 5 month training stint Shahzad did in Pakistan. These too should have had a JTTF on the edge of its seat – if it was active.

This might be why the administration was playing catch up with Shahzad, even after the bomb was detected and were only lucky to find a phone number connection to lead them to him.

Reader Frogg1 points out a very disturbing blurb inside a New York Times article chronicling the Times Square Bomber’s past:

George LaMonica, a 35-year-old computer consultant, said he bought his two-bedroom condominium in Norwalk, Conn., from Mr. Shahzad for $261,000 in May 2004. A few weeks after he moved in, Mr. LaMonica said, investigators from the national Joint Terrorism Task Force interviewed him, asking for details of the transaction and for information about Mr. Shahzad. It struck Mr. LaMonica as unusual, but he said detectives told him they were simply “checking everything out.”

Emphasis mine. Shahzad was under surveillance by the Bush administration, that is why the was an active Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation in 2004. And I doubt it was ever suspended under President Bush given this:

Mr. Shahzad apparently went back and forth to Pakistan often, returning most recently in February after what he said was five months visiting his family, prosecutors said. A Pakistani intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Mr. Shahzad had traveled with three passports, two from Pakistan and one from the United States; he last secured a Pakistani passport in 2000, describing his nationality as “Kashmiri.”

You don’t go back and forth to Pakistan with connections like this without being at least checked. It appears the Pakistanis were assisting the US in monitoring this character. So how is it he was able to get within a bum detonator’s distance from killing lots of people? Is this why the Pakistani arrests of his cohorts was so quick, yet the US is fumbling around looking for allies or other threats?

And it seems there may be a link between Shahzad and the failed NY City Subway Bomber Zazi.

Mr. Shahzad only recently became a US citizen last year, around the time Holder started closing down investigations. This act of resisting terrorists leads linked to Americans fits the pre 9-11 pattern of incompetence in the Obama administration. An administration filled with people who think President Bush went too far in protecting Americans from terrorist attack. Of course, all of us we avoided death and mutilation, pain and loss, would disagree that there was too much protection under Bush. I am sure the families of the victims in the Ft Hood massacre would have preferred Hasan and al Aulaqi were monitored instead of ignored.

President Obama is now learning how the loosening surveillance laws put in place under President Bush has exposed Americans to greater threat from Islamo Fascist sleepers. These sleepers are terrorist who also are American citizens or citizens of countries not normally considered part of the front on the war on terror. First we had the American citizen turned radical cleric, Anwar  al Aulaqi. His communications with American citizen Major Nidal Hasan eventually led to the Ft Hood massacre were 14 human beings had their lives snuffed out in the name of Allah.

Since al Aulaqi is American, it has become evident from news reports since the Ft Hood massacre that the liberals inside the Obama justice department had decided to terminate all investigations into al Aulaqi, leaving Hasan free to commit his heinous acts of mass murder (see here, here and here for details on the evidence against the Obama administration – more here on Ft Hood from RCP). al Aulaqi was also in contact with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day underwear bomber who nearly killed 300 people in the skies above Detroit, MI. There is a case to be made that, if team Obama had not taken their eyes off al Aulaqi, the Christmas Day bomber would have been detected and possibly stopped.

At least we would have known enough to not read the attacker his rights and allow is fellow sleepers the chance to go underground and continue to their targets here in America.

So it is no surprise that the suspect behind the NY Times Square bombing attempt is also an American:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced early Tuesday that an arrest had been made in the failed Times Square car bombing, saying that Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old American, was taken into custody at John F. Kennedy International Airport as he tried to fly to Dubai on Monday night.

Authorities said Shahzad, who is of Pakistani origin and lived in Connecticut, had paid cash for a Nissan Pathfinder that was found packed with explosives Saturday night on a tourist-crowded block in midtown Manhattan. The vehicle was set ablaze but failed to detonate.

Officials located Shahzad after a sweeping two-day investigation that yielded what senior Obama administration officials described as a flood of international and domestic clues suggesting a plot involving more than one person.

“It was clear that the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans,” Holder said at a rare middle-of-the-night news conference at the Justice Department, nearly three hours after the suspect was pulled from an international flight that had already left the departure gate.

This is the basic fault with the liberal view that the threat of government listening in on citizens in communication with known or highly suspect terrorists is not as great as the threat of political misuse of such surveillance. The checks and balances for the surveillance powers put in place by President Bush and ratified at least 3 times by votes in Congress provide plenty of protection from misuse, if the 4th Amendment hypochondriacs on the far left cared to pay attention.

Al Qaeda is not stupid, and in fact are extremely opportunistic. It has been no secret that the Obama administration planned to be less vigilant, dialing down the reactions to potential threats. It has also been well known the liberals wanted to reinstate the barriers of investigating terrorism around US citizens.

So al Qaeda took the natural path and changed its strategy to one of recruiting basically clean individuals who can move about the US with ease – especially true of US citizens. In this way they have less chance of success on an individual basis, but greater overall chance of success as their human weapons increase in number and agility.

It will not take long for al Qaeda to adjust their approach to improve the detonation procedures for their bombs – the only thing which saved 300 people from dying in the skies over Detroit on Christmas Day, and the only thing which saved those people in harms way in Times Square this weekend. Team Obama needs to reject the liberal madness and denial about being at war and get back to protecting the people. Else he will be a one term President who failed miserably.

Update: One thing I cannot understand is the idiocy of the Obama administration to tell HOW they tracked down the terrorist, thus providing our enemies clear directions on how to escape capture in the future:

A U.S. official said tracing the origin of the Pathfinder was a crucial part of the investigation. Shahzad bought the vehicle through an Internet listing. He gave the seller a fake name, but an e-mail from the transaction included a phone number that was from a disposable cellphone. Extrapolating from telephone records, authorities found Shahzad and confirmed his identity with the seller, the official said.

I am sure al Qaeda is very grateful to the US government for directing them on how to better avoid detection and capture.

Update: You only get so many chances to do the right thing before the American people will begin to take actions themselves (all legal, all valid). One mistake team Obama better not make again (this would be their 3rd strike) is to allow the latest enemy combatant to shut up behind the Miranda wall of silence. Marc Thiessen makes the case succinctly and accurately:

The only reason to read Shahzad his Miranda rights would be to preserve what he says as evidence in his criminal trial. But our first priority should not be preserving evidence for his trial—it should be getting intelligence from him. According to ABC News, Shahzad “recently returned from a five-month trip to Pakistan and the city of Peshawar, a known jumping off point for al Qaeda and Taliban recruits.” Just a coincidence? Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed responsibility for the Times Square attack. While it is unclear whether the Pakistani Taliban group, which is linked to al Qaeda, was behind the plot, it may very well have been involved. The one person who can tell us is Shahzad. We need to know who sent him, who trained him, and whether other attacks are planned.

I would wager that Faisal Shahzad could easily be one of the many trained killers who will be connected to Abdulmutallab (the Christmas Day Bomber). If this turns out to be true, then the Obama administration willfully and with criminal intent turned a blind eye to the safety of Americans, and therefore would be exposed to all options for those same Americans to remove the stupidity in DC which continues to leave us vulnerable to death and mutilation inside our own borders.

But first let’s go back to Christmas day and the horrific moment when a terrorist recruit from Africa almost detonated a bomb aboard a packed flight landing in Detroit, MI. In an instant of pure luck, the detonation failed and passengers were able to subdue the would be mass murderer, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

As I noted since then, that day when 300+ Americans nearly died was partially caused by the Obama administration putting on liberal blinders. The liberals have always felt investigating terrorist threats was some sort of sin or plot to listen in on their mad rants. They don’t like the idea that we can use our technological edge to intercept communications, even when known terrorists are communicating with possible allies and sleeper cells in the US.

They hate it so much they exposed the entire secret program used to track down members of terrorist attack squads in 2005. I have been writing about their lies and exaggerations ever since.

In my previous two posts (here and here) I noted how the liberals inside Obama’s administration actually shut down an ongoing terrorist investigation from the Bush era – and the result was the Ft Hood Massacre. I also noted how a known terrorist sympathizer (and US citizen fled to Yemen to carry Bin Laden’s message of hate) was probably the excuse used by Attorney General Eric Holder to close down the investigations that could have avoided the massacre.

Cleric Anwar al Awlaqi, being an American (traitor), was given special benefit of the doubt by Holder and President Obama. See, he was not fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq. He was just recruiting fighters to kill our people. And that made him somehow not dangerous.

It is clear from the timeline (click to enlarge) I produced from news reports that America turned a blind eye to Yemen and al Awlaqi until the first underwear bomb exploded in Saudi Arabia late last summer (with sufficient force to probably bring down an airplane). When that bomber’s trail led back to Yemen the Obama administration only partially woke up to reality. But they were too late and still had too many silly blinders on.

al Qaeda knew what it was doing. It took a chance and started recruiting people with no obvious or well documented connection to Islamo Fascist from places far away from the Afghanistan and Iraq. These people, they bet, would be dismissed by the new administration who was hell bent on doing things ‘different’ from the successful Bush years.

They were right and Abdulmutallab was able to get into position to kill 300+ people last Christmas.

After the attack, Eric Holder made another liberal bone-head decision. Instead of classifying this terrorist attacker as an enemy combatant and interrogating him to uncover the other attackers on their way to their targets, Holder mirandized the bomber and gave him a lawyer. That lost precious leads which went dead within hours of the failed attack. Holder would not be able to resurrect those leads for weeks – too late to take action.

Today comes more bizarre news on the liberals’ strained ‘legal logic’ as it applies to fighting terrorists . Some months back the FIS Court determined there was (or is) a technical error in the surveillance law fixes President Bush and Congress put in place in 2008. This determination apparently makes certain types of simple, normal data collection on communications illegal (still wondering why precedence is not working here).

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which grants orders to U.S. spy agencies to monitor U.S. citizens and residents in terrorism and espionage cases, recently “got a little bit more of an understanding” about the NSA’s collection of the data, said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because such matters are classified.

The data under discussion are records associated with various kinds of communication, but not their content. Examples of this “metadata” include the origin, destination and path of an e-mail; the phone numbers called from a particular telephone; and the Internet address of someone making an Internet phone call. It was not clear what kind of data had provoked the court’s concern.

…

“This is a basic tool we used to have, and it’s now gone,” said one intelligence official familiar with the impasse. “Every day, every week that goes by, there’s just one more week of information that we’re not collecting. You sit there and say, ‘This is unbelievable that we have this gap.’ ”

The data could be used to help analysts learn whom a suspect was working and communicating with, and to “detect and anticipate” a plot, the official said. “It’s not a concern over what was being collected,” he said. “It’s just a question about whether the law was written in a way that allowed the information to be collected in a way that they were collecting it.”

Due to the court’s decision the NSA has stopped monitoring threats! They stopped in December or January, just as Abdulmutallab was reaching his target here in the US.

The NSA voluntarily stopped gathering the data in December or January rather than wait to be told to do so, the officials said. The agency had been collecting it with court permission for several years, officials said.

This is just ridiculous. This kind of data has been available to investigators for decades. As technology advances the methods for access may change, but the class of information has been a staple for weeding out bad elements from innocent bystanders. This has to be really bad because the act of leaking this situation to the press (and therefore our enemies) is tantamount to admitting our defenses are down – and now would be a good time to attack.

What is worse, the fix to this is trivial – but the Obama administration won’t make the fix.

Some House Republicans have argued that the suspension of collection creates an intelligence gap that undermines the government’s ability to track and identify terrorist networks, according to officials familiar with the matter. Frustrated about waiting for a remedy, these Republicans say the gap can be closed with a technical fix to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the officials said.

The reasons for not fixing this problem are either political or ideological. Either way they are excuses bordering on criminal negligence. We have had a series of attacks on this country probing the new administration’s weaknesses given its liberal political bent. These probes have been too successful when we consider Ft Hood and Flight 253 last Christmas Day. In fact it looks like even the recent success stories were leads developed under President Bush.

The end result is Team Obama missed new leads (Abdulmutallab) because they turned a blind eye to threats  like al Awlaqi, who now is not just a legal target of surveillance but of assassination by his native government – without trial. Talk about hypocrisy. They horribly bungled one Bush era lead. So far their track record looks damn shabby.

But running blind for months when a simple legislative solution is at hand? What kind of lazy, bureaucratic crap is that? Wake up liberals: Process does not trump protecting Americas. We are at war, not preparing a legal case. Holder should be on the sidelines, not leading the charge into self destruction. When the next terrorist attack slips through, there better be investigations and hearings and heads should roll. Because this time, there will be no excuse.

As I noted here and here, the administration decided mounting evidence of collusion, along with public declarations supporting al Qaeda’s bloody methods and goals, were to be ignored if the target was American, or if their support was employed outside the primary battle grounds of Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Last year the administration actually had debates for months as to whether an Algerian funneling Jihad fighters to kill our military personnel in Afghanistan was actually an act of war! Think of how that warped thinking would have played out during the Cuban Missile crisis if JFK was not sure Russian Nukes on Cuban soil was a threat from Russia.

Today we have two news articles that may illustrate how these Obama ‘adjustments’ to national security are allowing terrorist more opportunities to attack us here in America. First a success story with some new details about the NY City Subway bombing attack that was thwarted last September:

The cooperation of would-be lead bomber Najibullah Zazi has helped law enforcement officials piece together a fuller picture of the evil plan to kill innocent straphangers around the 9/11 anniversary last year.

Zazi and his two Queens friends allegedly planned to strap explosives to their bodies and split up, heading for the Grand Central and Times Square stations – the two busiest subway stations in New York City.

They would board trains on the 1, 2, 3 and 6 lines at rush hour and planned to position themselves in the middle of the packed trains to ensure the maximum carnage when they blew themselves up, sources said.

During Zazi’s brief visit to Queens from his home in Denver last September, he rode the subway multiple times to the Grand Central and Wall St. stations, scouting where to best spread death and mayhem, the sources said.

Zazi has confessed that he, Medunjanin and Ahmedzay – all buddies from Flushing High School – traveled to Pakistan in August 2008 to fight with the Taliban against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

So how is it team Obama succeeded here? Well let’s give credit were it is due. Zazi and his cohorts were more than likely detected by team Bush in August 2008 as they traveled to Pakistan. This would initiate Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) investigations and would probably include FIS Court authorization to monitor communications and money transfers (the monitoring is apparent from these news articles). All this would be initiated under President Bush and inherited by President Obama.

In this case you have  a holdover investigation from the Bush period, as you did with Anwar al Aulaqi. In al Aulaqi’s case, the Obama administration decided he was too far out of the battle field to be treated as an enemy combatant. The result was Ft Hood and the underwear bomber.  Zazi had traveled to the heart of the war on terror and was known to have received bomb making training, there was no excuse to not follow through on Zazi. Once he and his allies began assembling their bombs and moving towards their target in NY City they were arrested.

In our second example we have the story of 300 missing Somalis, some of whom also could be terrorists. Somehow they slipped unseen into America and are now running lose, undetected:

Federal authorities say they’re certain nearly 300 Somalis allegedly smuggled into the United States by a Virginia man who admitted contacts with an Islamic terrorist group are in the country, but they can’t find them despite a worldwide search for leads.

The search, first reported by the Washington Examiner, started in early February after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Anthony Joseph Tracy on charges that he helped smuggle the Somalis into the United States from Kenya.

The 35-year-old has since been indicted on charges of conspiring with Cuban Embassy officials in Kenya to help the Somalis illegally enter the United States. ICE Agent Thomas Eyre has testified that authorities are “concerned” about the contact Tracy admitted having with the Somali terrorist organization Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda ally.

…

According to court documents, Tracy helped the Somalis move to the United States by getting them travel visas to Cuba through contacts he had at the Cuban Embassy in Kenya. Tracy’s attorney declined comment for this story.

The Somalis are believed to have entered the United States through the border with Mexico after making a circuitous trip from Kenya to Dubai to Moscow to Cuba to South America then to Mexico and northward, Eyre testified.

So what is different in this situation? First off it is targeted around Somalia. Even though Yemen and Somalia (and other countries) are known hot beds of Islamist Fascist activities, Team Obama’s debates last year had them focus only on the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It has been documented that team Obama took their eyes and ears off Yemen, only to realize in the wake of the underwear bombing of a Saudi Official (which did detonate, but did not kill its target) that probably was not a good idea, and so in late summer they began to watch Somalia again.

I fail to see why they did not do go through the same madness with Somalia (and other countries). Whoever started recruiting outside the war zones for attacks on America under this administration was very insightful. And they would also be very successful as Ft Hood and flight 253 proved.

Another difference here is the target of this smuggling ring is an American, which means there are extra precautions when getting permission to surveillance a US citizen. Team Obama has been hesitant to investigate leads that lead to American citizens, this is also documented in the previous posts linked above. That is why they took their eyes of Anwar al Aulaqi last summer. If they decided radical islamists cleric al Aulaqi was not a threat, god knows who else they decided to ignore in their summer of liberal stupidity.

Instead of the near perfect record of defending America under President Bush, President Obama’s approach is proving to be hit or miss at best. As we move away from the Bush period, and leads begun under is watch pan out one way or the other, we are left with the changes made by team Obama. And we are left with team Obama’s naive belief (now proven false) that we can safely let down our guard a little bit for the sake of liberal paranoid dogma.

Today the Obama administration admitted and proved that my assessment was indeed accurate.

The person team Obama willfully ignored is Anwar al Aulaqi. He was at the center of two of the most successful attacks on US soil since 9-11: the Fort Hood Massacre carried out by Major Nidal Hasan (also an American) and the Christmas Day Bombing attempt over the skies of Detroit by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Here is the timeline (click to enlarge).

Please refer to the previous post for  detailed explanation on why it illustrates clear evidence that liberal dogma inside the administration led them to decide to waive mounting evidence against al Aulaqi and his support for al Qaeda and its Jihad on America in determining the threat of this man. The post shows how the administration instead went stupidly back to the pre 9-11 mentality that left us exposed to deadly terrorist attack at the turn of this century. Because this man was an American, and due to all the liberal hand wringing about the USA possibly monitoring US citizens thought to be working with terrorists (under the guise Bush was listening to liberals babble), Team Obama established new rules for chasing down terrorist leads. Rules that left over 30 people dead at Ft Hood and over 300 within a few seconds of death on Flight 253 as it landed in Detroit, MI.

As if this record of events and statements is not enough evidence, yesterday the administration came out and announced my damning assessment of their actions and decisions was 100% right:

The Obama administration has authorized operations to capture or kill a U.S.-born Muslim cleric based in Yemen, who is described by a key lawmaker as Americas’s top terrorist threat, officials said on Tuesday.

The decision to add Anwar al-Awlaki, of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to the target list followed a National Security Council review prompted by his status as a U.S. citizen.

Officials said Awlaki directly threatened the United States. “Awlaki is a proven threat,” said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He’s being targeted.”

…

“He is very much in the sights of the Yemenis, with us helping them,” said Harman, who recently visited Yemen to meet with U.S. and Yemeni officials.

She told Reuters that Awlaki’s U.S. citizenship made going after him “certainly complicated.”

…

U.S. intelligence agencies had viewed Awlaki as chiefly an al Qaeda sympathizer and recruiter for Islamist causes with possible ties to some of the September 11, 2001, hijackers.

That assessment changed late last year with revelations about his contacts with a Nigerian suspect in the attempted bombing of a transatlantic passenger jet as it approached Detroit on December 25 and with a U.S. Army psychiatrist accused of shooting dead 13 people at a military base in Texas on November 5.

Clear and absolute confirmation of what I wrote Sunday.

But what is not admitted in this CYA piece by Reuters is the fact that a Joint Terrorism Task Force investigating Hasan was suspiciously shutdown at the same time the liberal Obama team was changing the rules on who would be investigated using the Bush era NSA-FISA fixes. As team Obama put the blinders on, it also directed our intelligence community to STOP monitoring al Aulaqi and his activities – he was an American after all.

Team Obama was clear last year as outlined in the NY Times article which is the basis of the previous post. Without solid and established proof of DIRECT support for al Qaeda’s terrorism war the benefit of doubt was to be given to the possible terrorist suspect, not to protecting US lives.

When I wrote the previous post I suspected the NY Times piece was the first step in a liberal media white wash of Obama’s deadly mistakes. The Reuters piece ,with its complete lack of analysis on why all al Aulaqi centered investigations were closed down (Hasan) or quashed (Abdulmutallab), is just more proof the media is trying to cover up for the administrations criminal negligence.

Team Obama deliberately took our eyes off al Aulaqi and Hasan because of dumb liberal dogma – and Americans died. The proof has now been provided by Team Obama themselves.

President George W Bush understood the threat of terrorism, having experienced it up close during his first year in office and then throughout the rest of his two terms. He touched the raw horror, sadness and anger 0f  9-11 for weeks and months as he consoled family and friends of the dead, and consigned many more to death and injury in wars meant to change the path of the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He understood that we could not let our guard down as we did prior to 9-11, when foolish legal theories blinded our national defense and domestic law enforcement from 12 high jackers we had in our sites when they were overseas, only to let them go into hiding once they were inside America.

The liberals in this country, on the other hand, never understood what was happening. To them the 3,000 innocent victims on 9-11 was the price of living with fanatical extremist muslims. It was also the price of silly legal theories that claimed proactive defense was a sin and mass murder was nothing to get worked up about.

When President Obama was candidate Obama, his national security team was clear that they were going to roll back the Bush hair-trigger defenses and do things very differently. They were adamant to prove we were not really at war, and that we could fight the bloody-mad Jihadists using courtrooms and prosecutors. Their naiveté knew no bounds.

One person leading this deadly effort was John Brennan, who was quite vocal about his intention to dial back our sensitivity to potential threats during the campaign. He infamously spouted nonsense about our threshold for even the minimum act of investigating detected warning signs:

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.

Emphasis mine. What Brennan was trying to cleverly not say clearly is that he and Obama’s team felt there was too much emphasis on checking out all threats, and not enough ‘probable cause’ to assess everyone in contact with known radicals. This naiveté would lead to two terrorist attacks on our soil before President Obama’s first anniversary in office.

The second person leading the charge of ‘the liberal lemmings’ was Attorney General Eric Holder, who actually hid his true intentions from Congress during his confirmation hearings.

The brief – filed by Holder, then a private attorney, former Attorney General Janet Reno and two other Clinton-era officials – argued that the President lacks authority to hold Jose Padilla, a U.S citizen declared an “enemy combatant,” indefinitely without charge.

In making their case, Holder and the others argued that using federal courts to fight terrorism, which includes providing Miranda rights to terror suspects, would not “impair” the government’s ability to obtain intelligence, which they called “the primary tool for preventing terrorist attacks.”

Thus the stage was set for team Obama to prove just how right President Bush was and how dangerously and criminally negligent they were going to be.

I have noted many times that the events leading up to the Ft Hood Massacre and near fatal Christmas Day airline bomb attack were suspicious and incoherent with what this nation knew about three people: Major Nidal Hasan (Ft Hood Massacre), Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab (Christmas Day Bomber) and Anwar al Aulaqi (Yemen Cleric).

There are very important details about these three people which resulted in team Obama dismissing them as threats, even with the knowledge and evidence they were enemies of America and reaching out to, or supporting, bloody Jihad against this country. It was these details which were made a priority by team Obama, obliterating the mounting evidence that would have stopped the efforts of these people – if America had kept the national security posture of President Bush.

First off, none of these people were located in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iraq. Team Obama decided early on to arbitrarily limit the geographic boundaries of terrorism, despite nearly two decades of evidence, going back to the Clinton years at least, indicating global Jihad had truly become ‘global’.

Secondly, two of these people are American citizens: Hasan and al Aulaqi. Most people forget that the liberal left was all wound up about surveillance and investigation of American citizens under President George W Bush’s changes to the FIS Court’s relationship to the NSA and the rest of the Intelligence Community. Holder especially wanted to go back to the pre 9-11 days where even an NSA intercept of an American talking to an known al Qaeda agent COULD NOT initiate a lead to the FBI to investigate and perform surveillance.

A couple of weeks ago the NY Times came out with an article which has helped prove my contention that the Obama administration made critical and stupid changes to our national security posture. Changes which led to the Ft Hood Massacre and Christmas Day bombing attempt, the latter of which only failed to kill 300+ people due to a faulty trigger and inexperienced bomber.

In my last post on this matter, some very dedicated and smart bloggers fighting the creep of terrorism into this country noted that I had not provided a timeline of events which demonstrated the evidence against Team Obama. So this time I have rectified the situation and created the following timeline that I have gleaned from news reports on the two incidents over many months (click to enlarge).

The Ft Hood/Hasan key events are in pale green text and the Christmas Day/Abdulmutallab key events are in pale blue along the top. The NY Times article key events are in dark blue below the timeline. Other important activities and periods are in yellow text below that, all leading up to the two attacks on America. So let’s walk through this and see if I have made my case.

In the ending days of 2008, after President Obama won election but before he took office, the NSA (presumably) detected Major Nidal Hasan in contact with US born, American citizen, radical Islamist cleric, Anwar al Aulaqi who had fled to Yemen after 9-11. This posed the most challenging of situations to the Bush era changes to FISA – two American citizens discussing terrorism, one inside the country and one outside. Aulaqi is a known al Qaeda cheerleader, but only the intelligence community knows if it had strong evidence at this time of actual support to terrorism (such as recruiting killers).

Once detected these communication incidents were handed over to a Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in San Diego. It also appears NSA continued to monitor the communications between Hasan and al Aulaqi under some form of FIS Court authorization. These authorizations are only allowed to run 90 days before the US Attorney General has to petition the court for a continuance. All of these activities are indicated by the three red lines which begin in December of 2008. At some point, the investigation was handed off to another JTTF based in Washington DC.

As noted in the time line, the next big event is President Obama’s inauguration day, followed shortly thereafter by the swearing in of Eric Holder as US Attorney General. Right around this time the first FIS Court 90 day authorization period might have expired and the task force investigation was apparently continued for a 2nd 90 day period. Without much time to investigate the details of the case, I can envision team Obama allowing the JTTF to continue its work as they were taking over the reigns of government.

However, at this same time – according to the New York Times article – the nation’s posture against terrorism was changing dramatically:

In March 2009, the Obama legal team adopted a new position about who was detainable in the war on terrorism — one that showed greater deference to the international laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions, than Mr. Bush had. But what has not been known is that while the administration has stuck to that broad principle, it has been arguing over how to apply the body of law, which was developed for conventional armies, to a war against a terrorist organization.

Emphasis mine. What some people might not grasp right away is how any such change on detainees will have ramifications well beyond to surveillance, etc. What this debate was really about is who is a legitimate threat to America, so who can be monitored, captured, detained or killed as an action of war. This is when we began the dialing back of our defenses and trip wires for following intelligence leads:

With the president’s directions in hand, Mr. Obama’s Justice Department came back on March 13, 2009, with a more modest position than Mr. Bush had advanced. It told Judge Bates that the president could detain without trial only people who were part of Al Qaeda or its affiliates, or their “substantial” supporters.

Here is the trap team Obama set for themselves. Now to detain (or investigate or monitor), the target had to be an associate or proven supporter of al Qaeda. By extension, the administration would be turning a blind eye to new recruits with no proven ties to al Qaeda. This ‘modest position’ killed over 30 at Ft Hood and nearly 300 in the skies over Detroit.

As the article notes, this change in posture did not go over well in many areas of the intelligence and national security community. That summer events started to cascade, as the liberals inside the Obama administration tried to ‘calibrate’ their criminal defense strategy to fighting the war on terror:

There was broad agreement that the law of armed conflict allowed the United States to detain as wartime prisoners anyone who was actually a part of Al Qaeda, as well as nonmembers who took positions alongside the enemy force and helped it. But some criticized the notion that the United States could also consider mere supporters, arrested far away, to be just as detainable without trial as enemy fighters.

That view was amplified after Harold Koh, a former human-rights official and Yale Law School dean who had been a leading critic of the Bush administration’s detainee policies, became the State Department’s top lawyer in late June. Mr. Koh produced a lengthy, secret memo contending that there was no support in the laws of war for the United States’ position in the Bensayah case.

Bensayah was an Algerian detained for providing help transporting Jihadists to the front lines in Afghanistan. He was helping to move fighters to the one battle field supposedly without any question or doubt in the US. He was helping to kill American and allied soldiers. This event is critical because the arrival of Koh in June and his document would also imply the US had no authority to monitor said supporters as threats. Supporters and recruiters like Isamist cleric al Aulaqi.

I have noted this ‘summer’ event along side another summer event – the suspicious closure of the Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation into Major Nidal Hasan. I do not think it is coincidence at all that Hasan’s communications with fellow American (but jihad-happy) al Aulaqi were summarily ignored around the same time as Koh showed up (see his bio for evidence of his hard left views) and was penning his missive on how not all terrorists can be considered terrorists.

This event also lines up nicely with the need for Eric Holder to submit a request for another (3rd) 90 day FIS Court authorization period. The questionable way a rationale was created to end the investigation pretty much confirms the Obama administration deliberately turned a blind eye to Hasan and his situation, especially since we know the communications continued well after the end of the task force investigation.

Anyway, during the summer the Hasan investigation was shut down and Hasan was able to be in a position later in the fall to murder over 30 fellow Americans at Ft Hood.

Also during this time period, another African far from the war front and without any clear connections with al Qaeda was banned from the UK. One Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – the underwear bomber.  He too was in contact with Islamist cleric al Aulaqi. But at this point it seems al Aulaqi was now being given the benefit of the doubt. No connection would be made until after his Christmas Day attack. Is it really coincidence that dots were not being connected at the same time the Obama administration was requiring strong proof of allegiance to al Qaeda before we would begin responding to threats?

The next big event on the timeline was the precursor ‘underwear bomb’ attack on Saudi Arabia in September 2009 (which also just barely failed to hit its objective). The technology behind this new threat unnerved the western intelligence community because it was clearly a weapon of mass destruction undetectable by typical security measures (as Abdulmutallab would prove on Christmas Day).

That attack was linked back to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which operates out of Yemen. Some time shortly afterwards, according to news reports, the US intelligence community returned its attention and focus to Yemen with great concern. However, also according to news reports, one connection failed to be detected – the connection between Abdulmutallab and al Aulaqi.

Also in September 2009 a foreign intelligence service learned of a new al Qaeda recruit named “Umar Farouk”. It is interesting this was a foreign intelligence service, and not ours.

Also in September, the debate on who would be considered a threat to the nation in the ‘war’ on terror raged:

In September 2009, national-security officials from across the government packed into the Office of Legal Counsel’s conference room on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, lining the walls, to watch Mr. Koh and Mr. Johnson debate around a long table. It was up to Mr. Barron, who sat at the head of the table, to decide who was right.

But he did not. Instead, days later, he circulated a preliminary draft memorandum stating that while the Office of Legal Counsel had found no precedents justifying the detention of mere supporters of Al Qaeda who were picked up far away from enemy forces, it was not prepared to state any definitive conclusion.

So with no consensus, the legal team decided on a tactical approach. For as long as possible they would try to avoid that hard question. They changed the subject by instead asking courts to agree that people like Mr. Bensayah, looked at from another angle, had performed functions that made them effectively part of the terrorist organization — and so were clearly detainable.

What this means is people like Hasan and Abdulmutallab would not be considered threats because they had no confirmed ties to al Qaeda. It means even American Islamist cleric al Aulaqi, without hard evidence to the contrary, would not be considered a threat if all he did was spout support for al Qaeda. The administration closed the door to any and all threats coming from new recruits and as-yet-undetected jihadists. This was the final step to making sure the administration would miss any and all warning signs on new recruits Hasan and Abdulmutallab.

What happens next is the Ft Hood Massacre in November, followed by the slow and painful realization that Hasan was not a ‘lone wolf’ disturbed individual, but was connected to the terrorist cells in Yemen. What did not happen in the refocus on Yemen – apparently – was a refocus on American born Al Aulaqi. He does not show back up on our radar until very late, and well after the Ft Hood Massacre.

As the timeline shows, once the administration took its eyes off the threats it struggled, without any hope, to catch back up. It had tied its hands and blinded itself, and Americans died at Ft Hood. Ten times as many nearly died on Christmas Day. This is not coincidence, but evidence of a pattern of criminal negligence based on naive liberal dogma.

I have no way to confirm the events, time frames and sequences of this timeline. I suspect it is off here and there, but generally accurate. It is sufficient for any real journalist to investigate, if they are not simply political apologists for the searing failures of this administration. There is very little doubt in my mind that this evidence shows team Obama made risky and dangerous decisions that left this nation exposed to at least two terrorist attacks. It wanted to change the national security posture of the nation, did so, and Americans died.

One Obama cabinet member I think is in serious trouble, though he seems to be flying under the radar of the Health Care debate at the moment, is Attorney General Eric Holder. The fact he held back key amicus briefs from his Senate review is very disturbing, and just another sign the Obama administration is anything but ‘transparent’:

During his confirmation more than a year ago, Attorney General Eric Holder failed to notify lawmakers he had contributed to a legal brief dealing with the use of federal courts in fighting terrorism, the Justice Department acknowledged on Wednesday.

…

Still, the “amicus brief,” filed with the Supreme Court in 2004, resonates years later as Holder finds himself defending the handling of some recent terrorism cases, particularly the interrogation of alleged “Christmas Day bomber” Umar F. Abdulmutallab.

The brief – filed by Holder, then a private attorney, former Attorney General Janet Reno and two other Clinton-era officials – argued that the President lacks authority to hold Jose Padilla, a U.S citizen declared an “enemy combatant,” indefinitely without charge.

In making their case, Holder and the others argued that using federal courts to fight terrorism, which includes providing Miranda rights to terror suspects, would not “impair” the government’s ability to obtain intelligence, which they called “the primary tool for preventing terrorist attacks.”

Clearly this is subterfuge, an effort to hide Holder’s risky and dangerous views from public scrutiny. This was a brief which exposes Holder’s (and Obama’s and John Brennan’s) views that they could dial back our reaction to terrorist threats used under the Bush admininstration. It explains completely why the terrorist investigations into Major Hasan were suspiciously and abruptly shut down before the true nature of the man was discovered. After all, he was an American citizen talking about Jihad and killing soldiers with another American citizen now in Yemen and tied to al Qaeda and 9-11.

In the twisted and limited views of liberals that is called free speech. I guess bombing civilians is also an admirable expression of political views.

The brief also explains the totally bizarre and reckless act of suspending interrogations of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and providing him the right to remain silent and a lawyer – even though he is not an American citizen! An act that could have allowed other al Qaeda killers to sneak by our defenses. It was this same extension of American rights to foreign threats inside our borders that allowed the 9-11 high jackers to ‘disappear’ from intelligence monitoring and kill 3,000 people.

I have written extensively about Hasan and Abdulmutallab, including the on-the-record comments of Eric Holder and John Brennan on how they planned to dial back our reactions to threats. Apparently they defined a new class of threat, the lone wolf, who they could apply new, less reactionary rules to. This is how, in my opinion,  Abdulmutallab’s actions and connections to known terrorist sympathizers slipped by our formally hair trigger defenses. After all, he too communicated with that American traitor in Yemen.

And it is now coming out this was not just one amicus brief, but a whole suite of them:

As a nominee, Holder had “a duty of candor to provide all information requested by the Senate Judiciary Committee in connection with his nomination,” said Stephen Boyd, communications director for Sen. Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the committee. “It is simply unacceptable that briefs in such significant cases were not provided to the Committee so that they could be discussed during his confirmation hearings.”

“We will review the documents carefully,” said Boyd, “and see how they shed light on the Attorney General’s terrorism policies, including his treatment of the Christmas Day Bomber and his decision to prosecute KSM in domestic criminal court in New York City. This will be a significant issue at his hearing in 10 days.”

Holder has a big problem – he was wrong. He can play games all day long, but his premise that we can fight a suicidal enemy through the courts instead of on the battlefield is mind numbingly stupid. And al Qaeda knows it has an opening. It is crafting its attacks very carefully and using new recruits in order to trigger the Obama civil rights blinders. These blinders have been shown many times now to provide sufficient cover to allow the attacker to get in place for an attack, and also provide time for others to go to ground if the attacker is caught.

Obama and Holder have been lucky, but they are also now distracted and back on their heels. The intelligence folks are not sure how far to go in pursuing leads, especially if the lead is an American. I look at the recent arrests of Jihad cheer leaders and I see a new pattern. Either they finally started taking the threat seriously (doubtful) or they are running around in a panic pulling in even the most marginal characters.

Time will tell, but the liberals were wrong. You cannot use the courts and miranda rights to protect Americans from al Qaeda suicide attackers. That is how 9-11 was allowed to happen. It is not a question of if the Obama-Holder-Brennan axis of stupidity will cause deaths (it already has in the case of Hasan), it is only a matter of when al Qaeda will be lucky enough to exploit our now relaxed defenses.

You can make change from DC, but you have to know the culture and the pitfalls. George W Bush was incredibly adept at getting what he wanted. It wasn’t until his party screwed up and lost Congress (they do the spending, not the president and not one fighting two wars), that Bush started to lose his magic. But if you look at his list of accomplishments and their scope, it is impressive.

Team Obama has taken their turn at this right of passage, and continue to fail to get the message. Their list contains a huge number of failures, not successes. Once you get into DC you need to learn that there is no instant power, and you need to adapt quickly. Your amazement with your fantastic ideas will not last long in the gristmill. Humility is a good starting point. Team Obama clearly demonstrates why in their crash from such high hopes.

What team Obama has yet to learn is you need to do two things to control DC:

• Play the power brokers right – which Obama has had some success in to a point, except he let the power brokers play him a bit too much.
• Keep public opinion on your side.

In this time of economic downturn there was one other rule which applied, and that was don’t experiment with untried ideas – and definitely don’t fail with them! On the economy the liberals in DC experimented – and failed. They failed because the relied on government spending, which is a slow, lethargic process. So slow that is why 85+% of the job creating money in the bill is still stuck inside the bowels of the federal government, not stimulating a single job.

The DC liberals should have known this. But they went with their warped liberal fantasy that slow government spending is better than quick and broad tax cuts.

The fact is most top people inside the failing White House still don’t get it!

“Typical Washington junk we have to deal with,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview. The president is deft at blocking out such noise, he added, suddenly brightening. “I love the guy,” he said, and in the space of five minutes, repeated the sentiment twice.

Critics, pointing to the administration’s stalled legislative agenda, falling poll numbers and muddled messaging, suggest that kind of devotion is part of the problem at the White House.

…

Mr. Axelrod said he accepts some blame for what he called “communication failures,” though he acknowledges bafflement that the administration’s efforts to stimulate the economy in a crisis, overhaul health care and prosecute two wars have been so routinely framed by opponents as the handiwork of a big-government, soft-on-terrorism, politics-of-the-past ideologue.

“For me, the question is, why haven’t we broken through more than we have?” Mr. Axelrod said. “Why haven’t we broken through?”

A better question is why haven’t you woken up and figured out your errors team Obama? Let’s see the evidence for “big government”

• We have the takeover of GM – now “Government Motors”
• We have the forced sale of Chrysler to a foreign automaker
• We have the cash-for-clunkers disaster
• We have a “pay czar” telling banks and investment companies how much they are allowed to pay
• We have socialists running amok planning various ways to take from the successful and distribute their wealth
• We have a bunch of from the Religion of The Green God who want to tax fossil fuels into oblivion, sending this WORLD into economic disaster
• We have liberals who won’t face facts that Americans do not want the government to take over and ration health care (i.e., bend the cost curve down).

We have seen big government work and fail, recently and over our lifetimes. We have also seen the free market engine of this country explore the farthest reaches of space, discover so many medical cures our biggest economic threat is living healthier and longer, and connect the world through the internet like no other civilization on Earth. Not to mention we saw it lift us out of the dark horrors of 9-11.

We know which avenue works best, and it is not letting another group of know-it-alls play God in DC with our lives.

Let’s jump to the ‘politics-of-the-past’ argument. What we are seeing is the liberals playing hyper-partisan politics, shutting out and denigrating their opponents – just like the scientists caught perverting the scientific method and peer-review process in Climategate. What we see is gross vote buying and corruption to the point there seems to be special set of laws for the DC power brokers.

We see DC ignoring the voters. Our democracy is being destroyed by fragile, stubborn egos who cannot realize they too must succumb to the will of the people, or be thrown out on their backsides. We have not only lost faith in the government, it has now become a threat to the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Trust me Axelrod, it is getting through on this side. Why is the voice of the people not breaking through your delusional, egotistical heads?

And finally, the soft on terrorism claim. From an administration who banned the term ‘war on terror’ this is rich. For an administration that ignored red flags handed to them by the previous administration on Major Hasan, who pushed to prematurely shutdown investigating this traitor turned “soldier of Allah” that is pretty thick denial. He killed and injured almost 50 people.

For an administration which reset our trip wires to react more cautiously to terrorist leads, to respect freedom of speech beyond sane limits (which means you can say any damn thing you want and these fools would give you a mulligan) this confusion is downright scary.

We lowered our response levels to NSA leads and 300 people nearly exploded over the skies of Detroit. We failed to interrogate the would-be bomber and now some unknown number of radicalized and trained American traitors are trying to enter this country and perform mass murder.

We know these things happened due to changes made by Team Obama. They rejected tax cuts and embraced the liberal fantasy of government spending. They rejected letting the markets work out the recession and instead took control of large segments of our economy.  They rejected our message on health care and continue to plow ahead with a government attack on our private insurance. They changed our posture to terrorist attacks right when al Qaeda adjusted to the liberal mind washing on monitoring and interrogation.

We get it Mr. Axelrod – when will you wake up from liberal fantasy land?

Update: Some similar observations at American Spectator

Well one reason may be the administration sees the need in the near future to keep certain information out of the public domain. Like all the opportunities they lost in stopping terrorists attacks when they employed their ‘treat terrorist as criminals’ approach. When the Obama administration failed to interrogate Farouk Abdulmutallab (the Christmas Day Bomber) and Major Hasan (mass murderer from the Ft Hood Massacre) they failed to find and follow leads to other Americans and foreigners on their way to here to Americans on American soil:

The top U.S. diplomat in Pakistan says the Obama administration does not know how many Americans might have disappeared overseas to train with al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.

The number is not thought to be large, but Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson outlined a possible “nightmare scenario” — people holding U.S. passports receiving terrorist training then returning legally to the U.S. to commit violent acts.

She said in a speech Friday to the Pacific Council in Los Angeles that the U.S. is working with Pakistan and other governments to figure out how to identify such people.

She said after the speech “there are more out there than we know about.”

Why  would Obama need to keep terrorist trials under wrap? Maybe he fears what future trials might expose? Seems like a very good reason to send Holder to the woodshed to think about his criminal negligence and mistakes.