Jan 07 2010
Administration Let Bomber Arrive In US Before Acting
Update: It seems someone inside the government is trying to paint a target on Leiter who apparently was at NCTC the day of the failed attack. Must be a really bad report coming out soon.
Update: This administration was definitely caught with their eyes off the ball. Not only did the President continue his vacation after the Christmas Day attack (interspersing golf games with his delayed addresses to the nation) but the head of NCTC also decided he could not pull himself away from the ski slopes as this near disaster played out:
The top official in charge of analyzing terror threats did not cut short his ski vacation after the underwear bomber nearly blew up an airliner on Christmas Day, the Daily News has learned.
This is just insane. With all the warning bells about pending attacks (briefed to the WH 3 days before the attack) it is unconscionable that the head of our dot-connectors did not drop everything and attend to his duties.
It is going to be an interesting day for America and its young President. It seems President Obama may be waking up to the foolish and dangerous policies of his liberal advisors and allies. And the wake up call is going to be made public to the American people. What we may find today is that someone inside the government decided to let this threat reach our shores before acting (see end of this post for the details).
White House national security adviser James Jones says Americans will feel “a certain shock” when they read an account being released Thursday of the missed clues that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day bomber from ever boarding the plane.
President Obama “is legitimately and correctly alarmed that things that were available, bits of information that were available, patterns of behavior that were available, were not acted on,” Jones said in an interview Wednesday with USA TODAY.
The President shouldn’t be alarmed though. He should have known that the people he put in place to watch over this country and its people had some fuzzy and risky concepts. For example, this is advisor John Brennan during the Presidential campaign:
To me, I think the government does have the right and the obligation to ensure the security and safety of its citizens. If there is probable cause, reasonable suspicion, about the involvement of a U.S. person in something, the government needs to have the ability to understand what the nature of that involvement is. The threshold for that type of government access can be high or can be low, and it [the probable cause threshold] needs to be somewhere in the middle.
…
You don’t want to just troll and with a large net just pull up everything. There are technologies available to pulse the data set and pull back only that which has some type of correlation to your predicate [the probable cause threshold].
…
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 [more] important.
Emphasis and editing mine. This dialing back on the sensitivity of our responses was openly discussed by John Brennan during the campaign (a Bush era reject from the intel community who couldn’t follow orders and thought he knew better than everyone else). He was slated to be the head of the CIA until the looney left torpedoed his nomination bid. But he is a central advisor to then candidate and now President Obama. We see again the White House vetted its people to the rigor of a White House dinner guest list.
Brennan is probably at the center of the latest National Intelligence Strategy – the guiding bible for the dot-connectors at DNI and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). A strategy replete with distractions that are supposed to be handled by other government organizations:
Recall, we are supposed to be monitoring threats and defending ourselves. … There is violent extremists (a.k.a terrorists), insurgents and transnational criminals – all good targets.
But then things get weird. We find challenges such as ‘global economic crisis‘, ‘failed states and ungoverned spaces‘, ‘climate change and energy competition‘, ‘rapid technology change’ and ‘Pandemic Disease (H1N1)‘.
There are no terrorists at the North Pole plotting as the ice melts and refreeze. While providing scientists with detailed polar images we snap automatically every day is not much of a drain on our resources, the fact someone is checking those images to make sure they are not accidentally revealing national secrets means they are not sifting data for possible real threats. Each meeting on H1N1 at DNI was a meeting not watching for threats.
President Obama is inexperienced in these matters, and he allowed himself to be misled by the anti-Bush anti-Cheney lot whose sole purpose has been to prove we did not need to be like Bush and Cheney to protect the country. This warped fever need to not respect the former President’s efforts and successes has led us to this (back to the original article):
“That’s two strikes,” Obama’s top White House aide on defense and foreign policy issues said, referring to the foiled bombing of the Detroit-bound airliner and the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in November. In that case, too, officials failed to act when red flags were raised about an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Hasan. He has been charged with killing 13 people.
Jones said Obama “certainly doesn’t want that third strike, and neither does anybody else.”
Exactly. It is time to go back to what Bush and Cheney left us, and it is time for the small minded folks who cannot get over their hatred of the past administration to be pulled from important jobs. We have heard many rumblings since the failed attack on Christmas Day from inside the intelligence and national security community that Obama’s team dialed back our level of alertness and response way too far:
This [Department of State] employee says that despite statements from the Obama Administration, such information was flagged and given higher priority during the Bush Administration, but that since the changeover “we are encouraged to not create the appearance that we are profiling or targeting Muslims. I think career employees were uncomfortable with the Bush procedures and policies and were relieved to not have to live under them any longer.â€
More unwise changes have become public as well. This nation came one failed detonator away from our second 9-11. We know more threats are in the pipeline, possibly already active. Our sensor nets have been proven to be turned way down, our responses dulled by liberal revenge against Bush-Cheney. We need to stop the liberal madness that has gripped some people. They are too unstable to be defending us.
This next story best sums up how the cool complacency of investigation and analysis is no replacement for the heat of war and the need for survival:
Reporting from Washington – U.S. border security officials learned of intelligence about the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day airline bombing attempt as he was en route to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed, officials said in new disclosures today.
What moron decided to wait until the threat had landed (via airliner) to make a move? Were they aware of 9-11 at even the crudest level?
I seriously doubt the career defenders who honed their senses, skills and reactions over the years under Bush would make such a rash decision.
If the intelligence had been discovered sooner, it could have resulted in the interrogation and search of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he boarded the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight, senior law enforcement officials said.
Pure BS! You can direct a flight to land outside America (in Canada in an unpopulated area). You can tell the crew about the threat and have the man searched and subdued. You can do a lot of things other than let him reach his target – us! ‘US border security officials’ means Department of Homeland Security, which in turn means Janet Napolitano. I now understand why her head may be on the chopping block for this fiasco.
And we need to watch how far we let the political fringe take us in any direction. Zealots blind to ideologies too often see the sacrifice of others as a necessary means to their ends. We need to make sure radical theories are not consuming our defenses (or anything else in government), as this example clearly shows.
I obviously will be posting again later today after the report comes out.
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As long as Obama attributes Islam terrorism to GITMO, he WILL get a third strike. He will remain too weak. He will have a weak national security. He will not be focused on national security.
We won’t win this war until Obama attributes to the radical Islam ideologies.
Obama is a weak, spineless, empty headed man who is run by the people around him. He sees this not as a problem with anytyhing they actually did, but rather just something rather difficult to explain away while everyone under him continues doing whatever they want.
Who can really believe that Chauncey Gardener has the stones to actually make a real decision?
For Obama and *Everyone* he has brought into the current government, Ideology is far more important than the actual safety of this country. They worry about a 3rd strike? We’re going to take a 3rd, a 4th, and a 5th.
Obama will not and cannot stop them.
Obama delenda est.
[…] AND DID NOTHING!!! They decided to question him when he landed. WHAT!!! That is correct, the Obama Administration allowed the Christmas Day bomber to arrive in the USA before acting on the overwhelming amount of data they had. Welcome to the war on terror, Obama […]
The naivity of this administration regarding the role of religion can only further increase suspicions that average Americans will have towards Muslims. However, we will feel safer if we know that the “persons of interest” have been vetted by our intelligence or flight safety personnel (even if they are career bureaucrats). The former head of security of El Al summed it up best —“You have stupid people carrying out stupid procedures”. He was amazed at how we can ignore common sense.
“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste”
according to Rahm Emmanuel, others Bill Clintoon?, said Bush had the benefit of 9/11 on his watch and Clintoon could have been a great President had it happened on his!
Chalk this up to stupidity if you wish but I, the eternal skeptic, believe that it is not too much of a stretch to say that the people who thrive on false crisises, Global Warming, Financial meltdown thus stimulus, Species going extinct thus no building or water for farmers, those folks would not mind losing a few hundred or thousand even, citizens if it allowed them to advance their adgenda and their affirmative action lyin Pinnochio President to shine.
Now call me crazy, call me names or whatever you will, but I fear someday I will be able to say I told you so!
dhunter – I have one disagreement with what you’ve written, although I don’t disagree with your idea that they foolishly look at a crisis as a way to advance their agenda.
But here’s what I believe fouls all their plans up: people who thrive on false crisises, Global Warming, Financial meltdown thus stimulus, etc, have NO IDEA WHAT TO DO when a REAL crisis shows up! That is why the “stimulus” has been such a disaster, they saw it as an opportunity to spread pork and never even considered whether or not it would fix the underlying problem! They, of course, are far too stupid to even have a clue as to what would fix the underlying problem.
And that’s what’s going to happen with the Terror response – of course they will try to use it to advance their agenda, but the Terror is going to keep on happening because the threat is REAL – and they still do not understand that the threat is REAL!
And no one shines when they keep on getting their ass kicked in public, which is what is going to happen to America as long as these clowns are in charge.
People who are arrogant enough to believe that they would welcome a real crisis are the first ones to turn and run away screaming when they find out just how hard it really is to do that.
If we learned of the guy after the flight was in the air, the passengers should have been “locked down” (seat belts fastened, nothing on your lap, no unescorted bathroom trips) and the flight IMMEDIATELY diverted to the nearest airport.
Recalling my flights from Europe … they would have several places to land … Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, etc. And they would not be more than an hour away from any of those places. Apparently the bomb was not in a state required for detonation until just before landing when the bomber went to the bathroom to prepare it. If the flight were diverted before preparation, the passengers would have been safe. The key would have been getting the plane on the ground and not allowing anyone to do anything that might allow them to prepare/detonate an explosive.
WWS,
Well spotted. Yes, these people manufactured crises to push their agendas then just fall apart when a real crisis shows up. That could be the sound bite of the political year!
CP,
As usual my friend, you are dead on right.
“they saw it as an opportunity to spread pork and never even considered whether or not it would fix the underlying problem!”
WWS:
They NEVER fix the underlying problem. They simply “manage” the problem in perpetuity making a new bureaucracy and getting a bunch more money allocated to the problem.
Look at any issue. Say the WIC food program. How many people were on WIC 5 years after it was initiated and how many are on it now? There are MORE people needed the program now than there were before. The problem hasn’t gotten better, the problem is worse! But they judge success by how many people they are “helping”. Nothing they do addresses the underlying problem of why they need WIC in the first place and does something that results in fewer women needing the program.
Rather than increase employment, these people will create new and extended unemployment benefit programs. So while the numbers of people on these programs grows, they crow about their “success” in “helping” them yet do not see it as a dismal failure in addressing the underlying causes of unemployment. If they fix the problem, then there is nothing for them to “do”. There is no program for them to create/manage that makes the people beholden to them.
Democrats NEVER fix problems. They simply provide salve. Their answer to any problem is lotion in the form of cash payments. When a problem happens that can’t be “fixed” with a “program” of cash payments, they are lost.
WWS,
You assume they want what you want. To improve the economy to make us safe, to improve healthcare and reduce the costs.
When in fact Pinnochio TOLD you he wants to redistribute the wealth, fundamentally transform America, give her back to her rightful owners!
They want power!
POWER over your lives from cradle to grave, Federal Government power to decide who gets medical care, who is worthy, Union power, to build a constituency beholden to Big Government, redistributive power to give to the uneducated, unwilling to work the incomes and benefits of those who are and do. To assume your goals are their goals misses the point.
They only tell you your goals are theirs to get your vote. Their goals are Power, Control, Central Planning!
All this accomplished by destruction of the current system! Destruction of Capitalism, Free Enterprise, Freedom of the Press and individual.
Stimulus did not work, because it was not intended to. It was intended to payoff constituents. Watch where the money goes, where it went!
It is happening!
Cannot you see what they do, not what they say?
It is not ignorance!
IT IS THE PLAN!
‘Locking down’ the flight could have worked in this instance but would not work in all instances since the bomb could have been prepared for detonation almost immediately after takeoff (my bomb making skills are zero therefore this is an assumption on my part).
I wonder what the Captain of the plane would have done had he been notified that he had a potential terrorist on board. It could have been something as simple as finding the 2 biggest / toughest guys on the plane and changing some seats. Can I assume that the border patrol who were going to wait until the flight landed did not notify the airline?
Put down and back away from that passive periphrastic! “Obama” being (at least nominally) masculine, it has to be “Obama delendus est.”
Well, it was under Bush that Major Hasan was recruited, trained, and promoted. He just went off under Obama. Bush is as responsible for coddling Islamists as Obama. Also remember that Abdulmullah got his visa in 2008 under Bush guidelines.
Federale,
It was under Obama that the terrorism task force investigation into Hasan was suspiciously closed down. It was under Obama the evidence was missed.
By your “logic” Clinton is responsible for 9-11!
Federale,
I should have known this was all Bush’s fault. I guess the fact that it was Christmas 2009 (Obama in charge, not Bush) when the incident occurred and all the signals were missed somehow still makes it somebody else’s fault. Who knows, if Clinton would have killed Bin Laden when he had the chance maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe Obama, instead of always blaming Bush, should actually make changes to Bush policies that make sense and put Americans at less risk. Like that’s going to happen!!
[…] Links to Visit – 01/07/10 Published in January 7th, 2010 Posted by TMH in Constitution, Financial, Founding Fathers, Illegal Immigration, Military, Politics, Religion, Survival, Taxation, Terrorism The Strata-Sphere – Administration Let Bomber Arrive In US Before Acting […]
“Cannot you see what they do, not what they say?
It is not ignorance!
IT IS THE PLAN!”
It very well may be the plan – but ask Dorgan, Dodd, and Ritter just how that plan is working out for them.
(and Flint, thanks for the correction – my grammar is quite rusty!)
As someone else on another blog said:
Wow, this is brilliance with a capital T.