Obama: we screwed up

President Obama met yesterday with his Cabinet and national security team to discuss the intelligence failures that led to the near catastrophic terrorist attack on Christmas day. 

But it was clear from the press statement he delivered afterwards that his meeting produced no explanation for the slew of red flags about this attack that all went unheeded – other than it was a serial “screw up.”  No doubt this is why he made such a point of conveying unbridled indignation:

When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way. It’s my responsibility to find out why and to correct that failure so we can prevent such attacks in the future.

This was not a failure to collect intelligence. It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already have. The information was there… It is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it….

The problem of course is that there’s precious little Obama, or any leader, can do.  After all, America’s alphabet soup of intelligence agencies were all integrated under the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 precisely to fully analyze and fully leverage such intelligence.

Frankly, it’s an indication of how hollow Obama’s get-tough words are that all he’s doing “to correct that failure” is exacerbating frustrations at airports worldwide by mandating even more feckless security rules.  Most notable in this respect is his new order for security officials to perform full-body, pat-down searches on US-bound travelers from 14 countries that are suspected of harboring terrorists. 

But even this seems designed more to score political points than to ensure airline safety.  After all, I see no point in subjecting travelers from Cuba to this extra layer of scrutiny, when no airline terrorist has ever hailed from that country.

More to the point, though, it is manifestly clear that all a terrorist has to do to avoid this heightened scrutiny is to fly into the US from a more tolerable country like the UK or, indeed, like Amsterdam, which is where the underwear bomber flew in from.

This is why I don’t blame Fidel Castro for denouncing his order as a “hostile action.” And it is why I sympathize with my friends in Nigeria (the country with the largest Muslim population in Africa) who are accusing Obama of ascribing guilt to 150 million of them based on the misguided act of one citizen.  Never mind that the Nigerian father of this wannabe terrorist literally warned US intelligence officers about his son’s intent. Well, so much for Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world, eh….

Indeed, instead of stoking the kind of anti-Americanism that only fuels al Qaeda’s recruitment drive, which this order is bound to do, Obama should hire more (and better train) intelligence officers to do their jobs more intelligently.  And this has more to do with connecting the dots that could capture or kill would-be bombers before they get to the airport than with monitoring expensive bomb-detecting scanners and frisking old ladies to no avail.

In any case, I cannot reiterate enough how delusional it is to think that America can win this war against terrorism when the mere threat of an  al Qaeda attack is enough to panic and disrupt the country from coast to coast. Not to mention the truly terrifying fact that al Qaeda has become so sophisticated that it was able to turn a Jordanian doctor – who US intelligence officials say was their “best al-Qaeda informant in years” – into a suicide bomber who took out seven CIA agents in Afghanistan last week. 

Finally, given his refusal to fire anyone for the White House gatecrasher fiasco, I fear Obama will only reinforce the caricature of him as all bark and no bite if he refuses to fire anyone for this screw up.  Therefore, after completing his review, I urge him to make quite a show of firing the person(s) most responsible.

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