Here is Obama’s remarks after the Christmas Day Bomber:
“The buck stops with me.”
“I am less interested in placing blame.”
Nice words.
But when it comes down to it, the Administration hid much of the ineptness inside that administration and how they are fighting this war. The New York Times explains the nuts and bolts, but we know what it all comes down to. They just don’t believe we are at war. I mean come on, it’s just some folks who don’t like us, so we need to find a way to get them to like us.
Worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday, President Obama met on Dec. 22 with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them.
In a separate White House meeting that day, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day.
Yet in those sessions, government officials never considered or connected links that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seem so evident and indicated that the gathering threat in Yemen would reach into the United States.
Just as lower-level counterterrorism analysts failed to stitch together the pieces of information that would have alerted them to the possibility of a suicide bomber aboard a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas, top national security officials failed to fully appreciate mounting evidence of the dangers beyond the Arabian Peninsula posed by extremists linked to Yemen.
Mr. Obama this month presented his government’s findings on how the plot went undetected. But a detailed review of the episode by The New York Times, including more than two dozen interviews with White House and American intelligence officials and with counterterrorism officials in Europe and Yemen, shows that there were far more warning signs than the administration has acknowledged.
The officials also cited lapses and misjudgments that were not disclosed in the declassified government report released Jan. 7 about what went wrong inside the nation’s counterterrorism network.
In September, for example, a United Nations expert on Al Qaeda warned policy makers in Washington that the type of explosive device used by a Yemeni militant in an assassination attempt in Saudi Arabia could be carried aboard an airliner.
In early November, American intelligence authorities say they learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named “Umar Farouk” — the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — had volunteered for a coming operation.
In late December, more intercepts of Qaeda operatives in Yemen, who had previously focused their attacks in the region, mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were “looking for ways to get somebody out” or “for ways to move people to the West,” one senior administration official said.
And the same day those White House meetings on terrorist activities took place, a Qaeda figure made ominous — and seemingly prescient — threats against the United States.
The Times describes how our intelligence was listening in on these fanatics but failed to pull it all together:
In the final weeks of the year, American intelligence officials, using spy satellites and communication intercepts, were intently focused on pinpointing the location of Qaeda fighters so the Yemeni military could strike them. By doing so, the American officials hoped to prevent attacks on the United States Embassy in Yemen, personnel or other targets in the region with American ties.
Yet they had unwittingly left themselves vulnerable, American officials now concede. Counterterrorism officials assumed that the militants were not sophisticated or ambitious enough to send operatives into the United States. And no one shifted more intelligence analysts to the task, so that they could have supported the military assaults by Yemen while also scrutinizing all incoming tips for hints about future attacks against Americans, one administration official said.
So, though intelligence analysts had enough information in those days before Christmas to block the suicide bomber on the Northwest flight, they did not act.
“We didn’t know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here,” Mr. Brennan said on Jan. 7 at a White House briefing.
An administration official added, “The puzzle pieces were not being fitted to any type of homeland plot.”
Read those bolded parts again. Obama’s intelligence agencies ASSUMED that the enemy just wasn’t smart enough to attack the US. Nine years after 9/11 and we have people in this administration and in our intelligence agencies who forgot the 3,000 dead and just assumed these yokels couldn’t get it done.
Wow…..
Did Obama inherit some of these problems? Most definitely. But he didn’t inherit his beliefs on terrorism. Those beliefs lead him to treat terrorism as nothing more than a isolated criminal activity to be squashed by law enforcement. Unfortunately most law enforcement work is done after the fact. After the crime has been committed.
That’s the Democrats views in a nutshell. No preemptive strategies to win this war. Just call out the cops to take a report after the fact and then issue some memos.
Or maybe they can just worry about the Christians in our country, and those evil people who don’t believe in abortion, as his TSA nominee does.
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