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While Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is coming under fire (and deservedly so because she claimed “the system worked” and later backtracked), she really doesn’t deserve as much blame here as the FBI–the lead agency for investigating terrorism (DHS has no authority to investigate terrorism)–and another person who has largely escaped notice and scrutiny:
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
…………………..
And most of the rest of it is the CIA’s and FBI’s fault.
We are quite correct to assert that Janet Nincompoopitano is an idiot for claiming that “the system worked,” but we are missing the point to blame this entirely on her incompetence. There are others who at least share the blame, and maybe should even be shouldering a lot more of it.
Don’t let them off the hook.
NOTE – Schlussel has a number of very informative updates on the flight 253 story that are worth reading.
when the Shoe Bomber failed in 2001 there was a reason nobody needed to hear from Bush … every single American already knew that Bush was serious about the GWTO and most people could have written the statement for him … “we will find them, kill them and repeat as needed” …
With Obama Americans do not know what he really thinks about the War on Terror … or more correctly they are afraid that he really believes his close Gitmo, bring KSM to NYC, overseas contingency operation nonsense and are desperate to hear he has changed his mind …
janeplain
14 years ago
What has Hillary Clinton got to do with this?
Larry Johnson said the following on CNN, that neither the the CIA or the FBI (or the State Dept., for that matter) had/has responsiblity to analyze and piece together information about various persons/groups who may have terrorist intentions:
JOHNSON: Perhaps. But, John, it’s not the CIA’s fault. Let’s be clear about that, number one. It’s not even clear that the CIA had the information about the al Qaeda efforts to use somebody from Nigeria. That may have been a signal intercepted at NSA.
The organization that was put together after 9/11 to fuse all this information is the National Counterterrorism Center, NCTC. CIA, that responsibility was taken away from CIA.
N. Ando
14 years ago
okay, do you have anything to say about policy? or are we actually going on what the president and his staff are saying in public?
N. Ando
14 years ago
so are you going to actually discuss policy, or are we really going on what the Obama administration offers the public to chew over?
Meremortal
14 years ago
I am annoyed with Obama for calling the incident a “failed attack.” The purpose of a terror attack is to influence policies and impede economies. The Christmas attack was successful, airline stocks have declined, policies on board airplanes have been changed, and people are more fearful or annoyed (due to security procedures) about flying. Flight attendants and pilots are more stressed, and casual flyers more likely to drive rather than fly when possible. The fact that the attack could have been much worse is beside the point. The government had NOTHING to do with the fact that no one was killed and only one person besides the attacker was injured.
I bet AQ is giving the attacker a solid B+. And that’s a better grade than the TSA and the Obama adminstration is getting on this attack. The attacker was succesful in getting a bomb through security and he did initiate ignition. These types of bombs require iffy detonators since metal can’t be part of the package. The attacker did the best he could under the circumstances and came incredibly close to killing aover 250 people. If he had been successful, we wouldn’t even know it yet. The word from the adminstration would be “don’t jump to conclusions.” It would probably be months before we would know the truth.
janeplain
14 years ago
@N. Ando:
If Obama has an actual policy, you will not be able to make out what it is/was/might be anytime in the near future. Don’t hold your breath.
While I believe that Obama’s rhetoric (or, in this case, lack thereof) is engineered to encourage liberals and conservatives that his defense slant is different from Bush’s, he’s actually only continued (and in many cases) advanced those policies.
janeplain
14 years ago
You are right on: Obama=Bush+. We tried to tell people that. Unfortunately, lies, corruption, and msm help got him elected.
N. Ando
14 years ago
fair enough. I’m new here and missed the Bush bashing. I should of become more familiar with the content before I commented.
SoCal Chris
14 years ago
From Team Sarah: BREAKING NEWS ABOUT RUSH LIMBAUGH TAKEN TO THE HOSPITAL IN HAWAII:
Team Sarah
A message to all members of Team Sarah
Team,
I come to you this evening with serious news about a great American who needs our prayers.
Rush Limbaigh, champion of values such as life, liberty, and the free market, was rushed to the hospital in Hawaii this evening and, according to reports, may be in “serious” condition.
Appranetly, pramedics were called when Rush complained of chest pains and he has been taken to an area hospital.
Members of Team Sarah in the Rush Limbaugh Fans for Sarah Group are following this and you can visit their group to learn more or to offer your own thoughts.
May God be with Ruish Limbaugh and his friends and family, and at this critical hour when voices such as his are refreshing and badly needed, may God be with his fans and the nation.
Couldn’t be bothered to read the article I linked to, eh?
“Well, Flight 253 Islamic terrorist Alhaji Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, complained to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that he felt his son was a threat, an extremist, and might be involved in some terrorist attack. That embassy, as with all U.S. Embassies, is under the control of the Secretary of State. Ditto for visitor and travel visas, which the agency issues. The day they heard this information, Hillary Clinton’s State Department employees should have revoked Abdulmutallab’s two-year visa to the U.S.
But she didn’t. She may not have known about it, but it doesn’t matter. It’s her State Department and, thus, her responsibility.”
But to be fair, Nappybrained Nitwit Napolitano’s group should have been better trained not to allow some scruffy idiot without a passport board the plain, unless, of course, it was a policy they were required to follow as per instructions from the State Department for certain desiganted groups.
batman
14 years ago
Hills isn’t blameless…
It is the responsibility of the U.S. State Department to grant the non-immigrant visa that authorized this whack-job to enter the U.S. in the first place. Now, It’s been a while since I’ve traveled abroad, but I do remember a requirement that visas are obtained in advance. Believe I recall this being checked once before boarding, and again, upon arrival. I know that it’s possible that things can be “out of order” upon arrival, and that some individuals never make it past immigration. Well, the value of that 2nd check is academic in this case. But, for crying out loud, the whack-o’s father, bless his heart, did go to the U.S. embassy with concerns…So, you’d think that this guy’s visa would have been yanked.
Just why wasn’t that visa revoked by the Department of State?
Its odd that the Department of State which supposedly grants the visas doesn’t share information with the DHS/TSA. Or, is this the totally transparent change we can believe in?
Don’t worry, the FBI will be on it, ….after the trail has gone stone cold.
Davey
14 years ago
This is why I wear boxers. No muss, no fuss and such ease of inspection.
Missy
14 years ago
From Mike’s sources:
After delivering his first public remarks Monday about a Nigerian man’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines jetliner over Detroit, the president motorcaded to the golf course at a nearby country club.
And of course the Obama team always, ALWAYS finds a way to blame Bush for the problem:
“Obviously the procedures and the protocols employed in this instance are ones that we’ve inherited that had been built over the course of several years since 2003,” [National Security Council chief of staff Denis McDonough ]McDonough said. His comments echoed Obama, who pointed out that the review he ordered of the government’s terrorist watch-list procedures is of a system that “our government has had in place for many years.”
Now, we get this from the Prowler’s sources:
“…as it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns — if any — from the Bush Administration.
“The idea was that we’d show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could,” says a staffer in the counsel’s office. “We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we’d declassify it if necessary.”
Now we know why it took Obama until Monday to speak, his so-callled foreign policy experts had to prepare the spin because it’s all politics:
The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. Other administration sources also say a flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama’s decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a “catastrophic” failure on Christmas Day.
“This White House doesn’t view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it’s a political issue,” says the White House source. “That’s why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue.”
Axelrod, who has no foreign policy or national security experience beyond occasionally consulting with liberal or progressive candidates running for political office in foreign countries, has been actively participating in national security briefings from the beginning of the administration. He has also sat in on Obama’s “war council” meetings, providing Obama with suggestions in both venues based on what he knows about polling and public opinion data, say several White House sources.
“[Axelrod] isn’t sitting in the meetings telling the President, ‘Do this because the polling shows that,'” says one source. “But we know that in less public settings, or on paper, David does provide guidance to the President that gives him added context to the recommendations and information our foreign policy and national security teams give him.”
Axelrod’s presence in the meetings has raised some eyebrows, as previous political advisers in the White House have typically not participated in such meetings. Bush Administration sources, for example, say that political adviser Karl Rove was not present at national security meetings.
Just so I’m clear; The president should have rushed from the golf course or wherever he was to the White House as soon as he got word of an attempted bombing? Why? Because there was a problem? By that logic no president should ever leave the building! There is always a problem somewhere! Extending the notion, Bush was quite possibly the most inept president in history. He set new records for vacation time.
While I agree that Ms. Napolitano is an epic incompetent and that airport security employs many unfortunate choices, the slur “Nappybrained”, and the vague reference to “certain desiganted(?) groups” does you no credit and leave a mental bad taste in the mouth.
Wemo
14 years ago
If Barry and Michelle want to live the life of a retired couple, they should be by all means a retired couple.
Just so I’m clear; The president should have rushed from the golf course or wherever he was to the White House as soon as he got word of an attempted bombing?
Truth be told, there was no evidence of the president doing any rushing. By the time he bothered to speak to the people he appeared to be quite bothered that he had to speak to the people.
We are well aware that presidents, at times, leave the WH we are also aware that technology travels with them as they vacation, they are still hooked in to whatever is going on where ever they may be.
In this case, I doubt that Obama was not aware of the foolish remarks his Press secretary and head of DHS were making, yet, it took him another two days before he bothered to attempt to spin his way out of it. In the mean time, people were still traveling, the people in Michigan were still very much rattlled and the rest of the thinking public were disappointed with how out of touch Obama was in spite of technology available to him.
does you no credit and leave a mental bad taste in the mouth.
Try Mentos or Vela-mints, they certainly saved me while reading 8 years of remarks by the left. You guys set the bar.
Toothfairy
14 years ago
@Jay: Most of Bush’s “vacation time” was spent in Crawford. These were generally working vacations in which he met with various heads of state as well as his own Cabinet. He didn’t waste vast amounts of taxpayer dollars to rent 9 million dollar homes in Hawaii. He didn’t appear endlessly on national TV and preen like a celebrity. And he certainly didn’t mail in responses to a crisis and complain of being “tired” after less than a year in office. When are people like you and the MSM going to hold him accountable?
Aleric
14 years ago
@Toothfairy
/Bravo
I have never seen a sitting president take a vacation every three months? Not to mention that when a crisis occurs and the President can’t or won’t be available for comment the news meida sees no issue with that.
Taqiyyotomist
14 years ago
Rahm, Axelrod, and Jarrett’s spokesman isn’t needed in Washington right now. Especially given that lately he has proven to be a terrible spokesman. He was quite the “gifted orator” when he was campaigning for the election of this regime, but now, not so gifted.
Then, who could? Who on the face of this earth is a good enough speaker to spin all that this current government is doing as something good and worthwhile? That would take an amount of speaking talent that rarely pops up in the timeline of history.
For this we can be thankful: Obama actually sucks as a public speaker, and as a convincing leader.
If he was good at it? Well, many people have been convinced to do many heinous things by some really good speakers and convincing leaders in the past century. And screw Godwin, and his little law, too.
As Debbie Schlussel points out,…
We are quite correct to assert that Janet Nincompoopitano is an idiot for claiming that “the system worked,” but we are missing the point to blame this entirely on her incompetence. There are others who at least share the blame, and maybe should even be shouldering a lot more of it.
Don’t let them off the hook.
NOTE – Schlussel has a number of very informative updates on the flight 253 story that are worth reading.
when the Shoe Bomber failed in 2001 there was a reason nobody needed to hear from Bush … every single American already knew that Bush was serious about the GWTO and most people could have written the statement for him … “we will find them, kill them and repeat as needed” …
With Obama Americans do not know what he really thinks about the War on Terror … or more correctly they are afraid that he really believes his close Gitmo, bring KSM to NYC, overseas contingency operation nonsense and are desperate to hear he has changed his mind …
What has Hillary Clinton got to do with this?
Larry Johnson said the following on CNN, that neither the the CIA or the FBI (or the State Dept., for that matter) had/has responsiblity to analyze and piece together information about various persons/groups who may have terrorist intentions:
JOHNSON: Perhaps. But, John, it’s not the CIA’s fault. Let’s be clear about that, number one. It’s not even clear that the CIA had the information about the al Qaeda efforts to use somebody from Nigeria. That may have been a signal intercepted at NSA.
The organization that was put together after 9/11 to fuse all this information is the National Counterterrorism Center, NCTC. CIA, that responsibility was taken away from CIA.
okay, do you have anything to say about policy? or are we actually going on what the president and his staff are saying in public?
so are you going to actually discuss policy, or are we really going on what the Obama administration offers the public to chew over?
I am annoyed with Obama for calling the incident a “failed attack.” The purpose of a terror attack is to influence policies and impede economies. The Christmas attack was successful, airline stocks have declined, policies on board airplanes have been changed, and people are more fearful or annoyed (due to security procedures) about flying. Flight attendants and pilots are more stressed, and casual flyers more likely to drive rather than fly when possible. The fact that the attack could have been much worse is beside the point. The government had NOTHING to do with the fact that no one was killed and only one person besides the attacker was injured.
I bet AQ is giving the attacker a solid B+. And that’s a better grade than the TSA and the Obama adminstration is getting on this attack. The attacker was succesful in getting a bomb through security and he did initiate ignition. These types of bombs require iffy detonators since metal can’t be part of the package. The attacker did the best he could under the circumstances and came incredibly close to killing aover 250 people. If he had been successful, we wouldn’t even know it yet. The word from the adminstration would be “don’t jump to conclusions.” It would probably be months before we would know the truth.
@N. Ando:
If Obama has an actual policy, you will not be able to make out what it is/was/might be anytime in the near future. Don’t hold your breath.
Have you seen the pics of the actual burned bikini underwear that the crotch bomber was wearing? Wow……
http://doodiepants.com/2009/12/30/al-qaeda-crotch-bombers-underwear-revealed-ouch/
@janeplain –
While I believe that Obama’s rhetoric (or, in this case, lack thereof) is engineered to encourage liberals and conservatives that his defense slant is different from Bush’s, he’s actually only continued (and in many cases) advanced those policies.
You are right on: Obama=Bush+. We tried to tell people that. Unfortunately, lies, corruption, and msm help got him elected.
fair enough. I’m new here and missed the Bush bashing. I should of become more familiar with the content before I commented.
From Team Sarah: BREAKING NEWS ABOUT RUSH LIMBAUGH TAKEN TO THE HOSPITAL IN HAWAII:
@janeplain:
“What has Hillary Clinton got to do with this?”
Couldn’t be bothered to read the article I linked to, eh?
But to be fair, Nappybrained Nitwit Napolitano’s group should have been better trained not to allow some scruffy idiot without a passport board the plain, unless, of course, it was a policy they were required to follow as per instructions from the State Department for certain desiganted groups.
Hills isn’t blameless…
It is the responsibility of the U.S. State Department to grant the non-immigrant visa that authorized this whack-job to enter the U.S. in the first place. Now, It’s been a while since I’ve traveled abroad, but I do remember a requirement that visas are obtained in advance. Believe I recall this being checked once before boarding, and again, upon arrival. I know that it’s possible that things can be “out of order” upon arrival, and that some individuals never make it past immigration. Well, the value of that 2nd check is academic in this case. But, for crying out loud, the whack-o’s father, bless his heart, did go to the U.S. embassy with concerns…So, you’d think that this guy’s visa would have been yanked.
Just why wasn’t that visa revoked by the Department of State?
Its odd that the Department of State which supposedly grants the visas doesn’t share information with the DHS/TSA. Or, is this the totally transparent change we can believe in?
@SoCal Chris:
Please G-d it isn’t serious, but that Rush will have a good outcome if it is.
@Meremortal:
Yep. You’ve nailed it. It may not have been as big a success as they wanted, but . . . it WAS a success.
See here for update on what the Muckmudd’s (spit) Secret lingerie bomber was doing here on his last trip.
Don’t worry, the FBI will be on it, ….after the trail has gone stone cold.
This is why I wear boxers. No muss, no fuss and such ease of inspection.
From Mike’s sources:
And of course the Obama team always, ALWAYS finds a way to blame Bush for the problem:
Now, we get this from the Prowler’s sources:
Now we know why it took Obama until Monday to speak, his so-callled foreign policy experts had to prepare the spin because it’s all politics:
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/12/31/the-politics-of-incompetence
Just so I’m clear; The president should have rushed from the golf course or wherever he was to the White House as soon as he got word of an attempted bombing? Why? Because there was a problem? By that logic no president should ever leave the building! There is always a problem somewhere! Extending the notion, Bush was quite possibly the most inept president in history. He set new records for vacation time.
While I agree that Ms. Napolitano is an epic incompetent and that airport security employs many unfortunate choices, the slur “Nappybrained”, and the vague reference to “certain desiganted(?) groups” does you no credit and leave a mental bad taste in the mouth.
If Barry and Michelle want to live the life of a retired couple, they should be by all means a retired couple.
@Jay:
Truth be told, there was no evidence of the president doing any rushing. By the time he bothered to speak to the people he appeared to be quite bothered that he had to speak to the people.
We are well aware that presidents, at times, leave the WH we are also aware that technology travels with them as they vacation, they are still hooked in to whatever is going on where ever they may be.
In this case, I doubt that Obama was not aware of the foolish remarks his Press secretary and head of DHS were making, yet, it took him another two days before he bothered to attempt to spin his way out of it. In the mean time, people were still traveling, the people in Michigan were still very much rattlled and the rest of the thinking public were disappointed with how out of touch Obama was in spite of technology available to him.
Try Mentos or Vela-mints, they certainly saved me while reading 8 years of remarks by the left. You guys set the bar.
@Jay: Most of Bush’s “vacation time” was spent in Crawford. These were generally working vacations in which he met with various heads of state as well as his own Cabinet. He didn’t waste vast amounts of taxpayer dollars to rent 9 million dollar homes in Hawaii. He didn’t appear endlessly on national TV and preen like a celebrity. And he certainly didn’t mail in responses to a crisis and complain of being “tired” after less than a year in office. When are people like you and the MSM going to hold him accountable?
@Toothfairy
/Bravo
I have never seen a sitting president take a vacation every three months? Not to mention that when a crisis occurs and the President can’t or won’t be available for comment the news meida sees no issue with that.
Rahm, Axelrod, and Jarrett’s spokesman isn’t needed in Washington right now. Especially given that lately he has proven to be a terrible spokesman. He was quite the “gifted orator” when he was campaigning for the election of this regime, but now, not so gifted.
Then, who could? Who on the face of this earth is a good enough speaker to spin all that this current government is doing as something good and worthwhile? That would take an amount of speaking talent that rarely pops up in the timeline of history.
For this we can be thankful: Obama actually sucks as a public speaker, and as a convincing leader.
If he was good at it? Well, many people have been convinced to do many heinous things by some really good speakers and convincing leaders in the past century. And screw Godwin, and his little law, too.