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| A source in the intel community explains it to Kristol |
| 2009-12-31 |
| Obama fundamentally altered the culture and risk-taking incentives of the intelligence community with policy and personnel changes. The sense of urgency is gone, and he's made it uncool to call the war on terror a war at all. If he wants to treat terrorism like a criminal act, rather than an act of war, we should not be surprised when the results look a lot like the bureaucratic foul-ups that happen all the time in law enforcement. He gutted the Homeland Security Council coordinating role, he diluted the focus of the daily intel brief, he made CIA officials worry more about being prosecuted for doing their jobs than capturing terrorists. He's so worried about the political consequences to his administration of a terrorist attack on our home soil that he denies the obvious -- that Major Hasan is a jihadist terrorist -- and he wants to shut down GITMO and bring terrorists here. He's made it his business to turn much of the national security apparatus set up by Bush and Cheney upside down and has succeeded.... On the comparisons to how the shoe bomber was treated, it's important to note that the shoe bomber was arrested in December 2001. President Bush's order authorizing detentions of enemy combatants was issued in mid-Nov 2001 and there was scant infrastructure in place or much precedent a month later to hold a terrorist in custody as an enemy combatant. Of course, by 2002 there was GTMO and the CIA program overseas, and President Bush started designating terrorists as enemy combatants, including Jose Padilla (a US citizen), al-Marri, and detainees at GTMO. Most important...I bet that if the administration had thought the shoe bomber had more information to provide under interrogation, President Bush would not have hesitated to order the Justice Dept to have the criminal charges dismissed and designate him as an enemy combatant. Will Obama take that step if his investigators tell him that's the only way to get more info from Abdulmutallab? The point is that we're eight years down the road from 9/11 and the shoe bomber, and Obama refuses to use the authority he has to get the intelligence we need. |
| Posted by:lotp |
| #2 He didn't go back to sleep, he went snorkeling. {8^P |
| Posted by: Parabellum 2009-12-31 10:06 |
| #1 We can't have horrible facts/slurs like this floating around. The One will need to find a sacrifice and somehow drown out any ideas that he might have somehow - anyhow - been even partially responsible. I wonder if the plane had gone down, would Obama wake up? I suspect this Christmas incident just irritated him. He'll go back to sleep as soon as he can control the media spin on this. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2009-12-31 06:04 |