President Obama is scheduled to address the nation in about an hour about the security failures leading to the crotch bomber's attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day.it will be interesting to see how he attempts to pick up the pieces.
Obama's National Security Advisor James Jones went public, promising the public that they would feel 'a certain shock'when they read the unclassified report of what went on.
I personally doubt there will be much meat there, because actually identifying the problem with an eye towards solving it in the future would be inconvenient and put the Obama Administration and its policies in a particularly bad light.
For instance, the headlong rush to mirandize Abdulmutallab and allow him to lawyer up so quickly probably squandered an opportunity to gain more intelligence from him about al Qaeda, and about his network in Yemen in particular. Obama Administration spokesmouths are trying to spin this, saying Abdulmutallab provided intelligence before he stopped cooperating with the FBI interrogation team after a few hours, but they're obviously trying to cover themselves in a difficult situation.First of all, anyone who followed this situation live knows that there was very little real interrogation time, and certainly not enough to garner anything much of value. And given the Obama Administration's policy and treatment of those charged with the responsibility of interrogating terrorists, do you really think any of those FBI agents were going to risk their jobs doing anything but going through the motions?
One thing I had to shake my head over was the factoid that US security officials apparently discovered the intel that Abdulmutallab was a possible security risk while he was on the plane, en route to Detroit. Yet they did not alert the personnel on the aircraft, preferring to wait until the plane landed to subject Abdulmutallab to 'secondary inspection', whatever that quaint phrase means.
Chew over that a minute. For the sake of political correctness and to avoid any appearance of profiling or violating a potential terrorist's 'rights', the men charged with America's security were prepared to let all 300 passengers and crew on Flight 253 die horribly, as well as an untold amount on the ground from the debris, as my friend Gerard points out.
If that had been an El Al flight. I guarantee you Abdulmutallab would have been restrained or otherwise rendered harmless by the security personnel on the aircraft before his hands got anywhere near his underwear.And that's assuming he managed to get on the plane in the first place.
Speaking of El Al, the US Department of Homeland Security went where it frequently goes for assistance on these matters... they asked our ally Israel for help, which is definitely a step in the right direction.
What the Israelis will undoubtedly tell them is that airport security is dependent not on technology, but on highly motivated and trained personnel committed to keeping passengers safe no matter what.
As a commenter on this blog put it, they will tell the DHS to stop looking for bombs and start looking for terrorists.
I have some doubts about whether the Obama Administration is willing to do what it would take to implement that policy, but we'll see.
For one thing, it would mean phasing out most of the current TSA personnel, let alone allowing them to unionize and fester. It would also require profiling and a much more practical attitude towards inconveniencing security risks as opposed to concentrating equally on everybody to keep organizations like CAIR happy.
Doing that would go against the political grain of the Obama Administration, but it would go a long way towards making sure that American air travel is not targeted by jihad terrorism.
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