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President Obama left a meeting with his entire national security team and delivered a short speech about the failed Christmas Day bombing, and the way forward on homeland security in the wake of what he called failures to connect the dots and prohibit Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding a plane.
The key bit of news, which was previewed by Robert Gibbs earlier today, was that the President announced he has told the Attorney General to stop the transfer of any Guantanamo detainees to Yemen “at this time.” It was unclear when those transfers would begin again, but this basically ends any hope for Guantanamo to be closed in a reasonable amount of time. Almost half of the remaining prisoners at Gitmo are Yemeni nationals. Obama vowed to eventually close Guantanamo, and said that he would never release detainees in a way making people less secure. In fact, he said that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terror group in Yemen from which Abdulmutallab came, used Guantanamo as the explicit rationale for their formation. How exactly the continued indefinite detention of Yemeni citizens cleared for release would in any way help that process is unclear.
Obama’s main message was that, while he has a robust plan on national security and is working diligently to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” terrorist networks, with what he called considerable success, he said that the failed Christmas bombing is proof that “the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way. And it’s my job to find out why.”
Obama mentioned two reviews, one led by Janet Napolitano on screening procedures, and one led by John Brennan on the intelligence community and the terrorist watch list system. The second review was where Obama really zeroed in today. He said that intelligence information was available and sufficient to keep Abdulmutallab off the plane. and yet the US government “failed to connect the dots which would have put him on the no-fly list.” He called it a failure to integrate and understand intelligence, not to collect it, citing several pieces of information and “red flags” that could have stopped this plot. While he acknowledged that intelligence is by its nature imperfect, this intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged, something he characterized as intolerable.
Obama announced that the initial reviews would be completed this week, with recommendations arising from those reviews scheduled to be implemented immediately. He cited new steps in increased screening through state sponsors of terrorism, explosive detection teams, and more federal air marshals on airplanes. He updated the terrorist watch list system and added thousands of people to the no-fly list. He announced that current visa information would be added to the watch list, which perhaps would have stopped Abdulmutallab from having his visa continue.
Not a whole lot new here, but in general it was a speech where the President took responsibility for failures in the system and vowed to fix them. Those fixes could lead to a more constrictive freedom of movement for foreign nationals and a potential headache for anyone coming into this country. But that’s the decision that Americans have apparently made, giving up some of that liberty for an illusion of security.
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Obama is a whoosey, who says He wants accountability but doesn’t want finger pointing.
You can’t have it both ways, either You want to find out who messed up and fix the problem, or You want to fix the problem with the people who messed up.
He and we forget that we are paying all these people, and when they mess up it costs us all.
A Real President whould have went into that meeting and said, ” If I don’t know in two days everybody and every agency that was at fault Your heads will roll. The American people and I expect people to do their jobs with no excuses, and no forgiveness for those who failed.”
Obama has shown from the day He was elected that He thinks being a nice guy will win the day. Forgetting that nice guys finish last.
We the people should be outraged and let Him know. We are treated like potential terrorists while the real terrorists, even ones they know about are treated as just normal people.
If that isn’t enough to outrage people, they should consider what has been spent since 911 to supposedly keep us safe. We are paying these Agency and Department heads hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to see that everything works, and their answer is that it can’t be perfect. Some of these Departments created to see that things like this don’t happen, and we find out things are no better than before.
If You add up the budgets of all of these Departments and Agencies since 911 we have spent well over a trillion dollars that is part of our Debt. Only to find out that we are getting little for our money. Now we have a President in one breath praises these people, then when finding out they failed says don’t do it again.
Lest we forget that 911 happened not because the terrorists wanted to commit the act, but that they were allowed into the Country, allowed to get the training they needed under our noses, and allowed access to fly on those planes. What this means is that all of our Government Agencies failed us inorder for 911 to have happened. These are the same Agencies and many of the same people who failed us then, and were not held to account failing us again. Again not to be held to account. “Your doing a great job Brownie,” is systemic and was not a singular statement.
dunno if it’s true, but I read that in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where the ‘terrorist’ was passing through the EU on his way to the USA the security checking of passports is handled by an Israeli company.
Maybe we should kneel down and beg them to not hurt us any more.
Or, maybe we should tell them Palestine will be a new state and they’d better begin to get used to it and plan on getting out of the security business if they can’t do it right.
Democracy Now had a great interview today. It speaks volume about this president and this whole “terrorism” thing:
In an extended interview, award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn looks back over the Obama administration’s foreign policy and national security decisions over the last twelve months. “I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism,” Nairn says. “But once he became president…Obama became a murderer and a terrorist because the US has a machine that spans the globe that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off, but he chose not to do so.” He continues, “In fact, as far as one can tell, Obama seems to have killed more civilians during his first year than Bush did in his first year, and maybe even than Bush killed in his final year.”
Israel lost its first fight with an armed group (of a few thousand fighters) in southern Lebanon in 2006. With all their military might and they couldn’t take one village on the border with Israel because the locals had trained and decided to fight without an oppressive Arab regime colluding with Israel to suppress all resistance (PA, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi, Syria, etc.) Were it not for these regimes and the US and a few hundred nuclear weapons at bay, the Israelis shouldn’t be qualified to handle security anywhere. What’s the Netherlands thinking anyway dealing with the Israelis? Isn’t the Hague in the Netherlands? Oh, wait…Israel is above international law!