Obama shows that he has learned nothing from the attempted terrorist attack

Obama met with national security officials today at the White House and said afterward that U.S. intelligence had failed to connect the dots that would have identified Abdul Mutallab as someone planning a terrorist attack and thus would have resulted in his being placed on a no-fly list.

Obama said:

The system has failed in a potentially disastrous way. The bottom line is this: the U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list…. This was not a failure to collect intelligence. It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.

This is a profound mischaracterization of what really went wrong, because it completely fails to question the suicidally wrongheaded premise of the existing U.S. policy, as clearly illustrated in the December 31 New York Times article that I discussed earlier today. The problem was not that the CIA failed to identify Mutallab as a terrorist. The problem was that the CIA made the identification of a person as a terrorist the requirement for putting him on a no-fly list and even of just subjecting him to extra scrutiny before allowing him on a plane. The fact that Mutallab was clearly someone of jihadist beliefs and associations should have been enough to keep him off a plane, even in the absence of definite evidence that he was on a terror mission from al Qaeda.

When Obama speaks of a failure to connect the dots, he means connecting the dots in a way that would have shown Mutallab to be planning a terrorist attack. Obama has completely missed the real problem, which is that our standard for keeping a person off a plane—only people known to be planning terrorist attacks are kept off—is insane.

Obama’s remarks show that he has undergone no rethinking in the aftermath of this near disaster—a disaster that, had it occurred, would have devastated his presidency. Which further shows how he is incapable of thinking outside the left-liberal box, even when his own political future is at stake.

From Fox News:

President Obama said Tuesday that U.S. intelligence had enough information to uncover the terrorist plot to bomb a Northwest Airlines flight but “failed” to piece it all together before the suspect boarded a plane for Detroit armed with explosives.

The president, who spoke after meeting with top officials to discuss internal reviews of the attempted bombing Christmas Day, said the suspect’s name should have been added to the no-fly list based on information available about him. He said the government will quickly make changes to ensure future attempts are thwarted.

“The system has failed in a potentially disastrous way,” Obama said. “The bottom line is this: the U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list.”

The president’s remarks counter suggestions from other officials that U.S. intelligence did not have enough information to prohibit the suspect from flying or take other severe action. Obama cited the fact that intelligence officials knew Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab traveled to Yemen, knew he had contact with extremists and knew that Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula wanted to strike not only U.S. targets in Yemen but the United States itself.

“This was not a failure to collect intelligence. It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had,” Obama said. “That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.”

Obama ordered the internal reviews while on vacation in Hawaii. While he has received preliminary reports since Christmas, Tuesday marked the first time he sat face-to-face with the heads of the various intelligence agencies to discuss how it was possible for 23-year-old Abdulmutallab to board Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit with an explosive device in his pants.

The administration is in the process of making and considering a number of changes in the wake of the incident. For one, Obama confirmed that the administration will not transfer additional Guantanamo Bay detainees to Yemen, though he insisted he will still shutter the controversial prison camp.

The president said initial reviews will be completed this week and a summary will be made available to the public in the next few days.

“We have to do better and we will do better. And we have to do it quickly — American lives are on the line,” he said.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the president has full confidence in CIA Director Leon Panetta and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. Panetta and Blair were just two of the high-level officials meeting behind closed doors with Obama.

Other meeting participants included: FBI Director Robert Mueller, Attorney General Eric Holder, National Security Adviser James Jones, counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

The president said during the meeting that the incident “was a screw up” and “we dodged a bullet.”

Gibbs dismissed the notion that there would be any finger-pointing at the high-level meeting.

“The president will not find acceptable a response where everybody gets in a circle and points at somebody else,” he said.

Fox News’ Daniela Sicuranza contributed to this report.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 05, 2010 08:56 PM | Send