By Deanna List
White House reaction to the Christmas Bomber is a recent example of the Obama/AP bait-and-switch policy.
The title of the article leads millions of yahoo users who scan the headlines to believe that Obama made the tie from the Christmas Panty-Bomber to Al-Qaeda. If you were watching football over the holidays, you wouldn’t know that Obama said the attack was an “isolated incident.” You might have missed his condemnation of the CIA for supposedly not sharing info with other agencies. When the CIA stated publicly that they had shared intelligence, and that all protocols were adhered to, Obama was forced to recant when overwhelming evidence proved him so wrong that even repeating a lie would not work.
Like the Ft. Hood response, the AP looked the other way at Obama’s initial diagnosis and waited for him to correct it.
How could the Obama camp right this one? What on earth could they come up with to save face? It took a couple days, but Emanuel and Alexrod managed to do it. You see, the CIA is still to blame; they must use faulty processes. Enter the chin-tilted Savior of the World to fix the CIA’s processes.
Why this strategy?
One, it attempts to explain why a vacationing open collar Obama made a fool of himself (twice) at a press conference in Hawaii.
Two, it takes focus away from the fact that there have been two terrorist attacks on American soil in the last six months.
Three (related to point two), it loads the public’s anger/fear/paranoia and thrusts it on America’s most trusted anti-terrorist agency. That is, instead of blaming the terrorists, the public is to blame the intelligence community. This, of course, is derived from Obama’s warped sense of reality when it comes to ‘pacifying’ those who promulgate “religious extremism” by way of “man-caused disaster”.
The endstate? Muslims are happy because Obama never so much as looks in their direction. In condemning the CIA, Obama’s far-left base is happy. At the same time, Obama seems tough on terrorism by taking some form of action in response to the Christmas attack… even if that action is another public smear campaign against those sworn to protect us. So, the losers are the CIA, the US, and anyone brave enough to call our enemies by name. Thanks, Obama.
Deanna List, is 2010 President, Lamorinda Republican Women, Federated
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A related article..we need to be fully aware of what is happening.
Spies, Terrorists, Brits, and Us in 2010 | HughHewitt.com | 1.04.10
By Clark S. Judge | Published: January 4, 2010
With the White House claiming it was on top of the global terror threat, the oversized-type front-page headline in the weekend Financial Times suggested a different story.
It read: “Yemen terror summit called.”
The lead paragraph reported: “Western governments have convened a top-level meeting for this month to discuss strategies to counter Yemen’s growing role as a recruitment base for terrorists in the wake of last week’s failed attack on a U.S.-bound airliner.”
Good move, if overdue. As most of the world knows by now, Yemen has emerged as a new safe house for al Qaeda operations. The terror sponsor trained the would-be Christmas Day bomber there. Among those who helped confirm the young zealot in his radical faith was the same now-Yemen-based cleric who apparently recruited the Fort Hood shooter. The Yemeni government lacks control over much of its own territory and is so unstable that many wonder if it might not be vulnerable to an al Qaeda takeover. And as Yemen sits at the entrance to a major chokepoint in global trade, the Red Sea, the major industrialized nations all have a stake in stopping the al Qaeda advance there.
So the summit is a good idea, exactly in keeping with president’s call for global cooperation in the anti-terror effort. The only problem is the United States did not call this summit. The United Kingdom did.
Perhaps there is a deep game going on here. But the president did not mention the summit in his weekend address, which was devoted to the terror challenge. As of Sunday afternoon, no hint of it had appeared on the White House or State Department websites. The FT story suggests no U.S. involvement, at least in a leadership capacity.
The British government may be working closely with the U.S. government on summit planning, of course. Washington may be deferring to London for the making of public announcements – the U.S.-U.K. long-standing “special relationship” in action once more. Except that the Obama Administration has made a point of snubbing the Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his government every chance it gets, including such gratuitous and diplomatically incomprehensible slights as returning a bust of Winston Churchill that the British government had leant to the White House as a statement of solidarity following the 2001 attacks.
Instead of marshalling nations to drive the terrorists from their latest lair, the administration devoted the weekend to insisting that the American people should consider the Christmastide breakdown of defenses against airline bombers no big deal. As the White House’s counter-terror point man, John Brennan, told Meet The Press (and in similar words most of the other Sunday talk shows), “Every other day the system has worked this year.”
Al Qaeda had a different take. In their statement claiming credit for the bungled Christmas attack, the terror network crowed that they had “dealt a huge blow to the myth of American and global intelligence services and showed how fragile its structure is.”
This administration seems to have made a practice of not listening to anything it finds inconvenient to hear. But for once they should remove their iPod plugs from their ears and catch the beat of something other than rhapsodies to themselves and their top man.
The shift from the Bush forward strategy against the terror threat – what that administration called the Global War on Terror – to a more passive, law enforcement oriented approach is a strategy for catastrophe. It means that we are depending on the intelligence services always getting it right, and, as the al Qaeda statement so helpfully points out, that is too much to ask of them.
It isn’t just that our spies and analysts missed the 9/11 attack, or that they found non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Forget that in the Cold War they didn’t see the fall of the Soviet Union coming, or that, earlier, they didn’t know the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba until they were there, or that they didn’t anticipate the building of the Berlin Wall, or that the first Soviet atomic explosion completely surprised them. No, failures of our modern intelligence agencies go back to the birth of those agencies in the Second World War. As America’s senior commander, George C. Marshall, told interviewers a decade after the war, the intelligence services “let me down every time in everything. They never told me what I needed to know.”
The point here is not to dump on the CIA, DIA, NSA, or any of the other U.S. spy bureaucracies. It is to acknowledge that, as dedicated and sophisticated as their people may be, these institutions have limits – severe limits – in what they are capable of doing. The administration’s shift away from a forward strategy (excepting, for the time being at least, in Afghanistan) to a Fortress-America-style wait-until-they-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes-so-we-can-arrest-them strategy makes the nation too vulnerable to the intelligence community’s inherent weaknesses.
As we enter the new year, the nation will be safer if the administration puts aside its breathtakingly inappropriate grudge against the British and its contempt for all things associated with its predecessor, acknowledges we are in a global war against terror networks, and from Gitmo to Iraq to Afghanistan to Yemen acts as though it means to win. In 2009 it passed through infancy and adolescence. In 2010 the nation needs the administration to grow up.
As I listened to Obama’s speech today on the radio, I was struck by how he mentions each department of intelligence took responsibility for their shortcomings within the aforementioned processes supposedly, yet Obama himself is still unable to take responsibility for his own mistakes. To do so publically would, of course, be political suicide, but then we have organizations such as the Nobel Foundation to be sure he receives ample reward for… for what again? In any case, his mistakes will be overshadowed by his huge triumphs in… in what again? It’s a good thing he’s not a professional athlete. Obama Campaign Promises – 0 Radical Islamic Terrorists 72 Americans prefer winners on their sports teams but apparently not in their political leaders.
Obama is quite aware that Americans don’t want security. Not real security which ensures their safety. Those processes are too much of an inconvenience. Like Cesar from the movie “Gladiator” he knows that America is the mob. You can put them at further risk and harm in every turn as long as you show them an illusion of progress and hope. We must thank our liberal and unscrupulous media for giving this Spielberg production the proper distribution.
The only true way to solve a problem is through education. Teach our populous about terrorists. Give them skills in identifying the signs and behaviors which give these people away. Empower our citizens to take action without getting involved and through self-reliance create an impregnable system.
How daunting this task must seem to us. We can’t train our entire populous in how to read and write much less become behavioral experts in spotting terrorists before they strike.
We do seem to do quite well with causes however and children across the nation are able to “Just Say No” to drugs and have learned to call out in booming voices with outstretched index fingers, “Stranger Danger” and all within a very short amount of time. Perhaps Nancy Reagan is available to take over both as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, but in her absence I postulate this alternative.
The answer is in movies and the internet. We need to educate our children and families through WWII styled movie inserts. This is a time when we have a captive audience which is prepared to pay attention and receive information. A series of short 30 second tips on how to spot a terrorist and how to report a possible threat could be inserted into the theaters and internet videos on YouTube for quick and widespread effect. If nothing else, it would give the illusion to those who would do us harm that we have become vigilant. Indeed those would be assassins which have slipped through our processes have been thwarted by unassuming heroes of our country. Why make our society the last line of defense?
The video production of these videos may cost the taxpayers $100,000 in total. If the bids come in higher, please let me know. I have a great studio producer in Pleasanton who can do it for a very reasonable price. He’s also a former Marine so I’m sure he’ll cut Obama a deal.
Increased security personnel would run into the millions on a continuing basis and be much less effective. A terrorist might be able to slip by our crack teams of highly skilled airport workers, but would find it nearly impossible to pass through a nationwide community watch program.
“Together we stand, divided we fall.” Obama is not to blame. The media is not to blame. We, the people, are at the root of our every issue, for as a country, we favor the laissez-faire approach to politics which only gives power to those who are completely undeserving, unprepared, and in Obama’s case even undocumented.