Common Ground?

The media has been full of analysis of President Obama's State of the Union address on Wednesday. His commitment to "stay the course" on health care reform while putting new emphasis on creating jobs has been well covered, as well as his continued attacks on lobbyists just before the White House offered special interests off-the-record conference call briefings on the speech's topics on Thursday and his renewed call for bipartisanship after a year of locking Republicans out of Congressional discussions on major legislation.

There is obviously much that pundits from both the left and right can praise or criticize about the President's speech depending the critics' political leanings, but I was struck that he actually advocated a course of action on new domestic sources of energy that both parties should be able to agree to pursue:

".... to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies."

All of these areas of increased domestic development of new energy sources would lead to reduced dependence on foreign sources of oil. This goal has been called for by candidates of both political parties during election campaigns for decades. Unfortunately, the Democrats have usually advocated achieving this goal for the most part through solar and wind technology without supporting (and even opposing) efforts to increase use of nuclear energy, offshore oil and gas exploration or clean coal technology.

With a Democratic President advocating these approaches to such a longstanding problem, the Republicans should stop attacking him and his party long enough to realize that we have a unique opportunity to make real progress on a problem that has long been out of the grasp of our political system.

Obama repeated these positions in his remarkable meeting with Republican House members in Baltimore yesterday. It is also reported that the Administration's annual budget for 2011 to be released on Monday will include a significant increase in government guaranteed loans for nuclear power plant construction.

Not only would these actions help the US increase the domestic production of energy without worsening emission of greenhouse gases (whether global warming is a real problem or not), but it would also be the source for more jobs in the US that cannot be exported since the whole point is to produce more energy in the US. The President should be supported for taking these positions in his address to Congress and for taking action in the proposed budget for next year that backs up his rhetoric.

Common ground is very difficult to find with all the partisan bickering that characterizes Washington politics in modern times. Our leaders should seize this opportunity and work together on expanding the pursuit of these new sources of energy in the US!

Sphere: Related Content

The Audacity of Spin

41st Republican Vote Against the Democrats' Health Care Reform Bill!

Last week Scott Brown, a Massachusetts Republican (a rare breed of politician), won the US Senate seat left open by the passing of Ted Kennedy after 47 years in office. Brown campaigned on the theme, among others, of promising to be the 41st vote against the pending health care reform bills in order to have the legislation reconsidered. The health care bills had been pushed through the House and Senate at the end of last year with only one Republican vote in the House and without much time for any members of Congress to read through the bills that both exceeded 2,000 pages. Brown also campaigned against excessive federal spending and the lack of bipartisanship and government transparency that, contrary to the promises of Barack Obama when he ran for President in 2008, has characterized Washington politics over the past year.

The next day, President Obama was interviewed on ABC by George Stephanopoulos. When Stephanopoulos asked the President for his reaction to Scott Brown's election, Obama said:

"Here's my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office, people are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years."

Obama seems to be saying that those who voted for Brown share the same views as those who voted for Obama for President in 2008! Really?? The photo above of protesters in front of the US Capitol was taken in 2009, not 2008!

And who is that man campaigning for Brown's opponent in the photo above? It would logically seem that his supporters would vote for the candidate he urged them to vote for, rather than for Democrat Martha Coakley's opponent.

The only common theme to the voter anger that swept Obama and Brown into office is that the voters are angry at their federal government and their President. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, the President that voters were angry with in 2008 was George W. Bush. The President that voters in Massachusetts were angry with in 2010 is Barack Obama.

It often seems, as Obama has gone to town hall meetings around the country over the past year making promises that he does not keep, that he thinks he is still campaigning against other people in office. He says things like federal spending is too high, people need jobs and special interests are running Washington, without any hint that he recognizes that he and his party are in charge of Washington now. It's the Democrats that are spending too much money now. No Republicans voted for the Stimulus bill that is costing billions of dollars without much return in terms of new jobs. It's the Democrats, including the President, who are now holding closed door meetings with special interests, such as the unions, AARP and the AMA.

So who does Obama think the voters and protesters over the past year are angry at now? Wake up, Mr. President.

It isn't 2008 anymore!!!!

Sphere: Related Content

Government Failures

While the media has been appropriately focused on the tragedy in Haiti following the earthquake of a week ago, as well as the US Senate race in Massachusetts, there have been more revelations about various failures in the federal government noted on the back pages of newspapers and news posts near the bottom of websites.

Christmas Day Terrorist Threat: The New York Times reported on January 17, 2010 that a White House intelligence briefing was held on December 22, 2009 at which John Brennan, the President's counterterrorism advisor, described increasing information about a potential Al Qaeda attack against American interests on Christmas Day. Most of the information involved terrorist plots being planned by Al Qaeda in Yemen. However, the officials evaluating this information did not anticipate that the threat could reach into the United States, such as on an international flight into Detroit.

The New York Times article went on to describe other information known to US counterterrorism officials on December 22 that was not mentioned in the "Failure to Connect the Dots" Report issued by the White House on January 7, 2010:

"In September, for example, a United Nations expert on Al Qaeda warned policy makers in Washington that the type of explosive device used by a Yemeni militant in an assassination attempt in Saudi Arabia could be carried aboard an airliner.

In early November, American intelligence authorities say they learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named “Umar Farouk” — the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — had volunteered for a coming operation.

In late December, more intercepts of Qaeda operatives in Yemen, who had previously focused their attacks in the region, mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were “looking for ways to get somebody out” or “for ways to move people to the West,” one senior administration official said."

This information was, of course, all in addition to Abdulmutallab's father reporting to the US Embassy in Nigeria in November about his son's extremist philosophy and decision to cut off contact with his family. This New York Times article can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/us/18intel.html?hp

The article also includes a graphic depiction of the unconnected dots of information that existed in various intelligence agencies before Christmas about the underwear bomber at: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/01/18/us/18intel-graphic.html

Fort Hood Shooting: Also last week, the Pentagon report on the Fort Hood shooting in November was released. The report determined that the Army supervisors of Major Nidal Hassan, the officer charged with the shooting, "bungled his performance reviews by excluding instances of erratic behavior in treating patients and signs that he might be growing sympathetic to suicide bombers." As a result of this conclusion:

"The leaders of the review, former Army secretary Togo D. West Jr. and retired Adm. Vernon E. Clark, a former chief of naval operations, recommended in a report released Friday that the Army examine whether "several officers" should be disciplined in the Hasan case."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011502010_pf.html

The FBI is also reviewing its role in failing to determine the threat posed by Hasan before the shooting and has begun to improve its sharing of information with the Pentagon, its information technology and its training of the members of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, which had been involved in investigating Hasan's behavior before the shooting.

Financial Crisis: Last week, the Congressionally established Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission began hearings in Washington to investigate the causes of the economic collapse in the US. On Friday, the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. testified about the role of their government agencies in the contributing to the financial meltdown. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said:

"Not only did market discipline fail to prevent the excesses of the last few years, but the regulatory system also failed in its responsibilities.... Record profitability within the financial services industry also served to shield it from some forms of regulatory second-guessing."

Mary Schapiro, SEC Chairman, also said that there had been "regulatory lapses" at the SEC. The Washington Post has also reported on the series of "whistleblowers who in recent years tried to tip off the SEC to potential wrongdoing, only to be ignored, misunderstood or left to wonder whether they were being listened to. The SEC has no system in place to guide how officials should handle tips and complaints from outsiders, making it difficult for investigators to take advantage of an invaluable source of information."

The failure to effectively investigate whistleblowers' tips led to the government failing to uncover misdeeds at rating agencies (such as Moody's) that failed to alert investors to financially collapsing companies or to reveal the Ponzi schemes by Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford, among others. In both the Madoff and Stanford cases, whistleblowers had been contacting SEC staff for years to reveal the wrongdoing and no adequate follow-up investigations occurred. Unlike other federal agencies with law enforcement responsibilities, the SEC does not have the right technology to analyze tips that come in or clearly articulated policies on how to handle the tips.

CIA Base Attack in Afghanistan: A particularly tragic failure resulted in seven CIA officers being killed last month when a double agent for Al Qaeda successfully detonated a suicide bomb as he was entering a previously secret CIA base near the Pakistan border. Many articles have been written about how this Jordanian Muslim terrorist was able to gain the trust of the intelligence officers in a war zone in order to get past several check points and explode a bomb that murdered men and women vital to our war on militant jihadists.

White House Gatecrashers: A government failure that has been the subject of late night comedians and other joking commentary is the incident commonly referred to as the "White House gatecrashers" who entered a State Dinner at the White House in November without invitations. Congressional hearings into how Tareq and Michaele Salahi were able to get into the White House event started this week, but the Salahis stood on their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent while federal investigations continue into whether they will be criminally charged for this breach of Secret Service security around the President of the United States.

Altered FBI Photo of Osama bin Laden: Another government foul-up of the past week was the updated FBI photo of what Osama bin Laden might look like now more than 10 years after the photo currently on file at the FBI (and on FBI Most Wanted Posters). Unfortunately, the artist who took on the assignment to "age" bin Laden's photo used a photo from the Internet of a Spanish lawmaker, who was not very pleased with this latest example of US government ineptitude. Gaspar Llamazares, the Spaniard whose face was now melded into bin Laden's on websites all over the world, was shocked at the FBI's sloppiness. He said:

"I was surprised and angered because it's the most shameless use of a real person to make up the image of a terrorist..... It's almost like out of a comedy if it didn't deal with matters as serious as bin Laden and citizens' security."

Update on January 21: All of the reports above do not even include the colossal failure of the Democrats (who control most of the federal government) to retain the US Senate seat in Massachusetts on January 19, 2010 that will now lead the Obama Administration and Congressional leaders to start afresh on their health care reform legislation, if not drop the attempt to pass it entirely. This surprising election upset for the Dems, of course, is the result of the Democrats in Washington failing to listen to the public's concerns about the health care proposals that were passed before the holidays with various back room deals or to listen to any ideas offered by their Republican colleagues. Sphere: Related Content

Thinking Outside the PC Box

For many years now, airplane passengers have been subjected to "politically correct" screening procedures when moving through airports to their boarding gates. Prior to 9/11, the FAA was in charge of the screening procedures in airports. Metal detectors were the most obviously used screening technology used. Carry-on bags were subject to search.

The major threats that were the focus in the early days of screening were hijacking airliners or terrorist bombings, such as the Lockerbie bombing of a PanAm jet over Scotland. After the UnaBomber threatened to blow up a plane leaving LAX in the mid-90's, all passengers were asked if they packed their own bags or whether they were asked to bring anything on board by another person. Everyone was treated the same. There was no profiling.

After 9/11, the TSA was created to take over airline safety and again all passengers were treated the same, even though all 19 hijackers of the planes on 9/11/2001 were male Muslim extremists from the Middle East, who took over the planes with small box cutters that were permitted to be carried on board in those days. After that, all passengers were prohibited from carrying on board any sharp instruments of any size.

Then after the Shoe Bomber tried to blow up a plane by igniting explosive material in his shoes, all passengers have been required to take off their shoes to pass through the X-Ray scanners.

Everyone has been treated the same. There was no profiling of those most likely to pose an extremist Muslim terrorist threat. To assure that no group could complain of discrimination, body searches and pat-downs of passengers have only been carried out randomly. This has
resulted in grandmothers and 3 year olds being randomly selected for more intrusive searches.

Political correctness, however, does not mean that common sense should be ignored, as it was with the attempted Christmas Day bombing by Nigerian Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, who paid for a one way ticket from Amsterdam to Detroit with cash and had no checked luggage. Common sense might suggest selecting such a young man for closer screening, even without a government rule specifically requiring such action or having him come up for such screening according to the random counter used for "political correctness".

Since AbdulMutallab spent a considerable amount of time in the restroom just before the plane's descent into Detroit, airplane security rules were immediately changed to prohibit any passenger from going to a restroom within the last hour of the flight. In addition, since AbdulMutallab put a blanket over his lap when he returned from the restroom to hide his attempt at igniting explosives in his underwear, the rules were changed to ban the use of blankets over laps during the last hour. Again, everyone was to be treated the same.

In the first move toward more rational airport screening , the Obama Administration has recently taken a move toward profiling when it announced that passengers traveling from or through 14 countries to the US would be subject to enhanced screening. The 14 countries are Cuba, Sudan, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. All countries but Cuba are mostly Muslim countries, which are either supporters of Islamic jihadist terrorism or have bases of terrorist activity.

Predictably, many of the countries on the list for enhanced screening have filed protests with the US government and organizations representing Muslims in the US have sent complaints to government officials.

While this new screening policy is a refreshing step away from "political correctness" and toward a more rational form of selecting airline passengers for enhanced screening, many commentators have called for profiling individual passengers who fit more closely the type of person who could pose a terrorist threat. Even the new procedures treat every passenger the same who is traveling to the US from or through the 14 countries on the list. Women and children will still be subject to same enhanced scrutiny as Muslim males of the ages of 18 to 40 years old who are traveling from or through the listed countries.

Is smarter profiling of individuals possible? Various media sites, research sites and other websites that discuss the data that would be available to use in profiling potential Islamic extremists show how difficult this task would be. One assumption that has been made by the Obama Administration must be dismissed from the government's thinking on the problem. John Brennan, the President's advisor on counterterrorism, stated in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in August 2009 that President Obama believes that we need "a broader, more accurate understanding of the causes and conditions that help fuel violent extremism, be they in Pakistan and Afghanistan or Somalia and Yemen."

Brennan went to say:

".... just as there is no excuse for the wanton slaughter of innocents, there is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, then people become more susceptible to ideologies of violence and death. Extremist violence and terrorist attacks are therefore often the final murderous manifestation of a long process rooted in hopelessness, humiliation, and hatred." http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-John-Brennan-at-the-Center-for-Strategic-and-International-Studies

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reported to have recently made similar remarks after the Christmas Day bombing attempt. But the data gathered by those who have studied terrorists over the years clearly shows that lack of education and job opportunities are not traits shared by those who have led and/or committed terrorist attacks.

The failed Christmas Day 2009 bomber is the son of a successful Nigerian banker who went to an elite university in London and lived in a posh condo while in the UK. The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan about a week later was a physician from Jordan. Nidal Malik Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, who killed 13 soldiers and wounded 30 more, was a military psychiatrist, who received his medical education from the US government. Bilal Abdulla, who was found guilty of two charges of conspiracy to commit murder in the three bungled car bombing attempts in Glasgow and London over 24 hours in June 2007, was a medical doctor. His co-conspirator in those attacks in the UK, who died in the Glasgow airport explosion, was Khafeel Ahmed, a doctoral candidate in engineering. David Headley (formerly known as Daood Sayed Gilani), a Pakistani-American Muslim who is charged with plotting to attack a Danish newspaper and helping the 2008 Mumbai plotters by scouting possible sites, is a Chicago-based businessman. Recently, five D.C. area college students were arrested in Pakistan when they tried to join the jihadist movement against American troops in Afghanistan.

The information about the American Muslim extremists mentioned above is set forth in a new study from Duke University and the University of North Carolina, funded by the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice. Information about this study can be found at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/1632/little-to-learn-from.-duke-unc-study-of-anti.

Osama bin Laden himself, the founder and leader of Al Qaeda, is a millionaire son of one of the wealthiest businessmen in Saudi Arabia. His second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an Egyptian physician.

None of the terrorists described above lacked education or job opportunities or suffered poor economic circumstances. Studies found throughout the Internet show that about half of the members of the terrorist organizations are very well educated. Many are medical doctors and engineers with advanced degrees. The other half may come from the poor economic situations as described by the Administration, but such conditions are certainly not typical of most terrorists.

Since these jihadists come from different countries, including the US and other Western countries, and different backgrounds, the only thing they share is an extremist Islamic ideological belief in:

"the desirability of puritanical Salafist Islamic reform in Muslim societies and the necessity of armed resistance in the face of perceived aggression."

Congressional Research Report entitled "Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology" dated July 9, 2007. http://terrorism.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=terrorism&cdn=newsissues&tm=108&gps=301_146_1030_634&f=11&tt=11&bt=0&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL32759.pdf

Salafism jihadism, as practiced by the followers of Osama bin Laden, has been described as "respect for the sacred [Islamic] texts in their most literal form," with an absolute commitment to violent jihad, "whose number-one target [is] America, perceived as the greatest enemy of the faith." These extremist views also reject democracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salafism_jihadism

If these radical beliefs are the only common trait that the terrorists really share, it seems very problematic that any effective profiling system for airport screening can be devised based on observable characteristics of people. This means that other forms of behavioral analysis and more efficient screening technology will need to be deployed.

Behavioral analysis has been used by criminal investigators for more than a century. It is commonly considered that the first attempt at "criminal profiling" in trying to define the type of person who might be a likely suspect was developed by Scotland Yard in the Jack the Ripper investigation in 1888. The FBI has been perfecting this technique for over fifty years. The use of this technique in criminal investigations requires developing the relevant facts of the crime involved.

To use this approach in detecting potential terrorists would require more information about likely subjects for enhanced screening than is generally known about airline passengers. As a result, those who have access to any information about likely subjects need to take note of suspicious behavior, such as: young men traveling alone, paying for one way tickets with cash, having traveled through certain countries (as the government has recently done) and with seat assignments near the windows over fuel tanks. There should also be easy airport personnel access to the broadest lists maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. There seems to be no reason to cull the TIDE list down to smaller lists for use in selecting passengers for closer scrutiny, other than to avoid offending certain people. The alternative is to put everyone through the full-body scanners.

With regard to the use of technology, the Washington Post published a chart recently that illustrates the various technologies available for airport screening at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/12/29/GR2009122900419.html?sid=ST2009122902788

The comments shown in the chart relate to how effective the technology might have been in detecting the explosive material used by the underwear bomber on Christmas Day.

The only technology depicted in the chart that might have found the explosives in Abdulmutallab's underwear on Christmas is the cloth swab that would be swiped over carry-on bags and/or clothing and then put into a machine that detects traces of explosive material. However, the only additional technology that is being widely deployed in airports since the Christmas Day incident is the whole-body imaging machines that are raising privacy concerns.

There is clearly much more thinking "out of the box" that needs to be done by the airport security agencies.

Sphere: Related Content

Great Minds......

In my posts earlier this week about the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on a jetliner landing in Detroit, I made certain observations that have now been confirmed in statements made by other "great minds" more familiar with the government's analysis of what went wrong with the US intelligence integration process and the decisions on how to correct the failures in the US intelligence community that allowed the Failed Underwear Bomber (henceforth FUB) to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam on December 25, 2009.

Confirmed Observation #1

"For ultimately, the buck stops with me. As President, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people. And when the system fails, it is my responsibility."

President Barack Obama made the above quoted statement yesterday during his remarks in the White House on the intelligence community's failures to connect the dots between the known information about Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a planned attack by a Nigerian on US soil and FUB and how to correct the human and systemic failures that allowed FUB to board Flight 253 on Christmas in Amsterdam.

In my post on Wednesday, I suggested that, if no individuals in the Obama Administration or the intelligence community were to be held accountable for the intelligence failures that allowed the failed Christmas attack, that former President Harry Truman's standard should apply, which was that "The Buck Stops Here" in reference, obviously, to the President.

To his credit, President Obama publicly took that responsibility because it appears, from the White House Review on the failed terrorist attack on Christmas Day that was released yesterday, that so many people and technological systems contributed to the failures to connect the dots that Obama has to take responsibility in order to get the various elements of the intelligence community involved to take the action necessary to remedy the problems identified.

The various elements in the intelligence community that contributed to the failures discussed by Obama yesterday were demonstrated in a diagram that appeared in today's Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/01/08/GR2010010800170.html

Confirmed Observation #2:

In my post of Monday, I noted that the White House counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, went on four national Sunday morning TV shows and said that there was no single piece of information that was a "smoking gun" which could have identified FUB as a bad guy that should not be allowed to board Flight 253 in Amsterdam on Christmas Day. Based on reports I had read by then, it appeared to me that there were various bits of information, as Brennen himself even mentioned on Sunday, that should have been connected and consolidated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which was created after 9/11 to carry out that responsibility, in order to assemble a "smoking gun" pointing at FUB, as my illustration above attempts to demonstrate.

In today's Washington Post, Dana Milbank made a similar observation about an answer that John Brennan gave during the press briefing that took place after the President's remarks discussed above. Milbank noted that, when the Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Weisman asked Brennan "why dots weren't connected."

"Brennan launched into a long discussion about "dots in separate databases" and "husbanding of those dots" and "access to more of those dots" and "making sure that we can leverage the access to those dots." And once the dots in separate databases are husbanded and accessed and leveraged, they form the shape of a smoking gun." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/07/AR2010010704069_2.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

I guess I could say that you read it first, but it only matters that the appropriate people in positions of responsibility and influence come to the right conclusions and that our national security is improved.

Sphere: Related Content

Accountability for Failure to Connect the Dots in Christmas Day Bombing Attempt

Yesterday I noted that President Obama emerged from a meeting with his national security team and announced that the intelligence community had failed to connect the various bits of intelligence about the Failed Underwear Bomber (henceforth: FUB) in time to prevent him from boarding Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day in Amsterdam. Obama said that he would not tolerate such serious human and systemic intelligence failures in the future. I ended my post by saying "let's see what that means".

Well, today the first response from the White House was heard from Denis McDonough, the National Security Council's chief of staff, in several morning TV interviews. McDonough said that everybody in the meeting with the President yesterday took responsibility for the failures to integrate the intelligence about FUB. He further stated:

"The fact of the matter is that everybody in that meeting said they have a solemn responsibility. But here's what it won't be — the typical Washington blame game where everybody passes the buck. "

This is, at least, the second White House staffer to complain about the "typical Washington blame game" since the Christmas Day airplane bombing was foiled by an alert Dutch passenger (rather than the government personnel who are paid to protect the traveling public). As I noted in my post about the first White House rant against the "blame game", this term seems to be used when White House staff people are concerned that their boss is being blamed for the problem under discussion.

In this case, the White House boss (AKA President Obama) is not the person being blamed at the moment. He is the one who may be looking for someone to hold responsible for the problem since he said: "I will not tolerate it". "It" being the failure of the intelligence community to connect the dots about FUB. So if the "blame game" that Mr. McDonough is concerned about means "passing the buck", as he suggests, our President should be reminded that one of his Democratic predecessors in the Oval Office said "The Buck Stops Here".

If no one else is held accountable, maybe we have to follow the wisdom of Harry Truman and look to the occupant of the Oval Office to take responsibility and stop passing the buck, as Mr. McDonough said.

Sphere: Related Content

President Obama Declares Failure to Connect the Dots, Not Lack of Intelligence, Caused the Security Breakdown on Christmas Day Bombing Attempt

Today the President announced, after a meeting with his national security team, that:

"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. In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. The information was there. Agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it. And our professionals were trained to look for it and to bring it all together.

Now, I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That's not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it. Time and again, we've learned that quickly piecing together information and taking swift action is critical to staying one step ahead of a nimble adversary.

So we have to do better -- and we will do better. And we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line."

The President's announcement today is consistent with the conclusions I reached in my post of yesterday. There are members of my family circle who will find it difficult to believe that my views on anything would ever agree with President Obama's. I hope they mark this day.

Now, years after the federal government addressed the organizational and mindset barriers to information sharing between intelligence agencies that led to the failure to connect the dots before 9/11/2001 by establishing the office of Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, the question is whether there will be any consequences for those responsible for the serious lapse in the process of intelligence integration that President Obama described. He sure had all the appropriate people for a line-up of potential suspects in the meeting with him today.

In referring to the government's failure to connect the dots before the failed Christmas Day bombing, the President said: "I will not tolerate it". Now let's see what that means.

Sphere: Related Content

"No Smoking Gun" Warning of Christmas Day Bomb Attempt, says White House Counterterrorism Advisor

John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, appeared yesterday on "Fox News Sunday," CNN's "State of the Union," ABC's "This Week," and NBC's "Meet the Press" to talk about the failed attempt by an Al Qaeda trained Nigerian to blow a hole through a Northwest Airlines plane landing in Detroit on Christmas Day. In those appearances, Brennan said that "There is no smoking gun. There was no single piece of intelligence that said, 'this guy is going to get on a plane'."

What he did not seem to acknowledge is that, after the 9/11 Commission Report identified various shortcomings in the intelligence community that failed to alert the government to Al Qaeda's plans that resulted in the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Congress acted to change the intelligence community's structure and mindset in order to encourage the sharing of information between agencies to connect the dots.

One change made by Congress post-9/11 was to create the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). According to the NCTC website, its mission is described as follows:

"By law, NCTC serves as the primary organization in the United States Government (USG) for integrating and analyzing all intelligence pertaining to counterterrorism (except for information pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism). NCTC integrates foreign and domestic analysis from across the Intelligence Community (IC) and produces a wide-range of detailed assessments designed to support senior policymakers and other members of the policy, intelligence, law enforcement, defense, homeland security, and foreign affairs communities." http://www.nctc.gov/about_us/about_nctc.html

It was anticipated by the 9/11 Commission and Congress that, since intelligence is gathered by several intelligence agencies throughout the federal government, one central government body should be in charge of gathering, analyzing and integrating the information together to provide actionable and more complete reports for use in preventing, if at all possible, future terrorist attacks on US soil. The NCTC is that central government body, as its website says:

"NCTC implements a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission: “Breaking the older mold of national government organizations, this NCTC should be a center for joint operational planning and joint intelligence, staffed by personnel from the various agencies."

As the President's Counterterrorism advisor, it, therefore, seems strange that John Brennan should go on four national news shows in 2010 (more than five years after the establishment of the NCTC) and say that the government's failure to identify the Underwear Bomber from Nigeria before he got on NW Flight 253 was because there was "no single piece" of information to identify him! As my rough sketch above tries to illustrate, the NCTC is tasked with putting the pieces of information together. They are not charged with looking through a haystack to find one piece of information that says: "Stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, from boarding Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam on Christmas Day."

Brennan himself seemed to correctly recognize the root of the problem on Sunday when he said:

"What we need to do as an intelligence community, as a government, is be able to bring those disparate bits and pieces of information together so we prevent Mr. Abdulmutallab from getting on the plane."

As I believe Homer Simpson would say: Duh!!!! That is what the NCTC was required to do!

Here's what Brennan said was known to the US before Christmas Day:

"We had information that came from Mr. Abdulmutallab's father. His name was put into what's called the TIDE record system. [Ed. Note: TIDE is compiled and maintained by NCTC.]
We also had, though, intelligence, snippets of intelligence that came in, that didn't refer directly to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab but had little bits and pieces of information that we now know, in hindsight, related to Mr. Abdulmutallab."

According to other reports, the CIA apparently had information about a Nigerian who might have met with Al Qaeda in Yemen, whose name was in part Umar Farouk. Other agencies may have had information about a planned attack by a Nigerian. There may also be other "snippets of information" that could have been available to NCTC to add to these other puzzle pieces in order to identify this threat before Christmas.

Let's hope that Mr. Brennan, the NCTC and the other intelligence agencies can improve their ability to assemble the puzzle pieces of information more quickly in the future. Sphere: Related Content

New Year's Resolutions?

New Year's Eve statements issued from two national governments could give some hope that there will be a change in the future actions of these governments in the new year.

The first of these potentially hopeful statements came from North Korea, which called for an end to "hostile" relations with the United States in its annual New Year's message. Part of that statement said: "The fundamental task for ensuring peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and in the rest of Asia is to put an end to the hostile relationship between North Korea and the U.S." This surprising message comes after a year of missile tests, shipping weapons to Iran and others, ignoring international pleas to return to negotiations on its nuclear arms program and general saber-rattling along its border with South Korea.

Why would North Korea send signals of such a change in its attitude toward the US? Could the personal letter sent by President Obama to Kim Jong Il have triggered this change in attitude? Whatever it may be, it could at least be some sign of hope.

The second statement of a potential change in attitude by a government actually was issued on the website for the White House, presumably on behalf of the US government! Under the heading of "The Same Old Washington Blame Game", White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, wrote on his blog that those criticizing the Obama administration for its reaction to the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on the Northwest Airlines flight into Detroit, including especially former Vice President Dick Cheney, are "engaged in the typical Washington game of pointing fingers and making political hay, instead of working together to find solutions to make our country safer."

That sounds like a refreshing new approach of bipartisanship by the White House, after ignoring Republican ideas on major legislation, inviting only Democrats to the White House to discuss health care reform bills, meeting with only Democratic Senators in the Capitol just before the holiday recess and generally spending the year reminding Republicans that elections have consequences. But maybe the plea of " working together to find solutions" only applies to finding ways to better defeat the terrorist threat to the country. Even that request to work together would be a hopeful sign.

Unfortunately, Mr. Pfeiffer's noble request to stop the finger pointing was contradicted in his next sentence: "..... for seven years after 9/11, while our national security was overwhelmingly focused on Iraq – a country that had no al Qaeda presence before our invasion - Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda's leadership was able to set up camp in the border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they continued to plot attacks against the United States". Could the reference to the "seven years after 9/11" be considered pointing fingers at the Bush administration? If that is true, this White House statement by Mr. Pfeiffer must really mean that he just does not like fingers being pointed at President Obama.

Let's take a look at what the former VP said that prompted this White House web log. Dick Cheney said that President Obama "is trying to pretend we are not at war." He then referred to recent administration actions to try the 9/11 masterminds in civilian court in New York City, giving those criminal defendants Constitutional rights of due process, closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and other such actions that he thinks sends signals that the US does not view terrorist acts of violence as "acts of war" but rather criminal acts that need to be fought with different methods than traditionally used in war.

Cheney is not entirely correct in his statements. Obama and his appointees often say that we are at war. Whenever Obama uses the word "war", he refers to the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and his new term, as Pfeiffer pointed out, the war against al Qaeda. In his blog entry, Pfeiffer referred to a speech recently given by Obama's counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, to help explain how well the President understands that we are at war. In that speech, Brennen said: "As many have noted, the President does not describe this as a "war on terrorism." That is because "terrorism" is but a tactic—a means to an end, which in al Qaeda’s case is global domination by an Islamic caliphate." Pfeiffer repeated that explanation in his blog entry at http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2009/12/30/same-old-washington-blame-game.

So it appears that Obama recognizes that we are at war, but only if it is described in words according to his world view. Cheney says that Obama does not think we are at war because Obama uses terms and takes actions that are contrary to Cheney's view of how to fight those who threaten us.

Pfeiffer, in his rant against finger pointing at the current occupants of the White House, adds this observation: "To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda..."

It appears in the end that Pfeiffer (on behalf of Obama) does not like Cheney's rhetoric and Cheney does not like Obama's rhetoric, which is emphasized in actions that speak very loudly that, whether Obama uses the word "war" or not, he views the struggle with Muslim terrorists as including symbolic gestures and law enforcement tools.

While this looks like just a "war of words" between the last administration and the current one, as an American, I would like to see more evidence of Pfeiffer's opening sentiment, which is that our leaders should work "together to find solutions to make our country safer". When we all face a common enemy, no matter how this force of evil is described, finger pointing in any direction should stop.

Let's use all the tools, experience, intelligence, weapons and American ingenuity available to win the war, whatever it is called! Sphere: Related Content