The President knew what? My constituents would like to know the answer.
— Hillary Clinton on the Senate floor, 2003.
Those words were screeched by the former senator—while she brandished a copy of the New York Post bearing the headline, “Bush Knew!”— when it was discovered that the White House had received a warning in August of 2001 that bin Laden intended to strike in the United States.
That risk assessment—which provided no actionable intelligence—was used to hammer the Bush administration for incompetence, complacency, and even tacit approval of the plot by many on the Left.
Now we have had a second attack on America in the last few months where clear and actionable intelligence appears to have been ignored by the Obama administration.
Nidal Hassan, the Ft. Hood shooter, was known to be in contact with a radical Islamist cleric, a frequenter of terrorist-friendly websites, and had explained to colleagues how infidels should have their heads cut off and boiling oil poured down their throats.
Now we have Umar Abdulmutallab:
After Abdulmutallab’s father warned U.S. Embassy officials in Nigeria last month that his son had disappeared and had become increasingly extremist, the son was placed on a watch list of more than 500,000 names. He was never put on smaller subsets of the list that bar people from flying or select them for additional pat downs and other security.
The U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. Isn’t that part of the State Department? What’s Hillary doing these days, anyway? Keeping busy, I hope?
The Wall Street Journal reports that the NSA had intercepted several communications that revealed that al Qaeda members in Yemen were planning an operation involving a Nigerian. (The NSA is paying particular attention to Yemen, as President Obama has released many Gitmo detainees to that particular hotbed of terrorist activity.)
Furthermore, the father of Abdulmutallab met with the CIA in Nigeria, and this meeting led to another the following day which included representatives of the CIA, the DHS, the State Department, and the FBI.
President Obama interrupted a golf game in Hawaii to comment on the massive failure of his administration:
“Round and round she goes, where the buck stops, nobody knows!”
Well, almost:
“A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable,” Mr. Obama said.
He said he had ordered government agencies to give him a preliminary report on Thursday about what happened and added that he would “insist on accountability at every level,” although he did not elaborate.
Here we have a case where the CIA, FBI, DHS and the State Department all are known to have been informed about a threat from a specific, named individual—and at the very same time terrorist chatter is being intercepted which seems quite clearly to describe the same man. And that man is allowed to board an airplane under his own name.
President Obama promises “accountability at every level.” He likes making promises, this president.
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I heard on the radio somewhere yesterday that someone involved in this mess was a Gitmo release?
I don’t know if we can stop everything that might happen based on what we know. It does seem as if this guy should/could have been stopped at many points, but stuff slips between cracks all the time, no matter who is in charge.
Yes we need to try and do our best to make sure the cracks are really small, but there’s always going to be cracks.
While I am annoyed every. single. time. they do something that they blasted Bush for, I want to be careful how I retaliate. Not saying you are doing that here, Mike, just in general.
I believe that the leadership of al Qaeda in Yemen contains prisoners released from Gitmo. By the Bush administration, by the way.
(See? I’ll give it to both sides.)
“He likes making promises, this president.”
Yes he does. President Obama seems to be deliberately trying to change his image to correspond to Americans’ unhappiness with his performance. This actually has me more worried! I have not been impressed by the intelligence of whomever is driving the train (Emmanuel? Axelrod?) and I don’t trust their ability to gauge what it is about the President’s first year in office that has so many of us upset and frustrated. It seems like they are fixating on projecting strength; the news reports about the President bowing to foreign leaders, not using words like “terrorist,” etc. Well, that’s part of the problem, and the Nobel prize speech and his discourse regarding the Christmas Day terrorist attack on the Delta flight in Detroit are more muscular than we are used to hearing from his administration. However, I have even less respect for a leader who is so quickly willing to change his stance on such fundamental concepts simply due to the numbers from some polls.
Let’s hope the President is truly learning from his errors, and the change we see is sincere, and comes from him growing. Knowing Emmanuel and Axelrod I doubt that’s the case. I think it’s just more packaging. If it is our enemies will see through that. I hope I am wrong.
Rufus, you always seem to bring up a subject I was saving for a post.
Check out Shelby Steele’s piece on Obama, if you have a chance. He sounds like he’s saying the same thing as you are:
The spin will be, ‘GOP playing politics with terror,’ just wait and see.
You’re right Christian. And to be fair, that’s what the GOP said about the Democrats in 2003.
The difference being, of course, that the GOP has always been tougher on terror, so their criticisms on this issue are not as easy to characterize as politically motivated.