President Barack Obama
Former Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, a distant cousin of current Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, has slammed the kinfolk, over the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a NWA-Delta airlines flight.
However, Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration are to blame as well, as they thought up the poorly maintained terrorist watch list and separately the no fly list, which contained so many innocent people, mixed in with terrorist names, it lost its effectiveness.
The various branches of federal law enforcement and intelligence, do not appear to be communicating with each other, carrying on a turf war. The CIA has much greater intel than the FBI, but there are items the latter sometimes stumbles across, which they keep to themselves and vice versa.
Former Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney
As stated with the Fort Hood terrorist attack, files are not being cross-referenced. The United States has the capability to address and defeat the terrorist threat, but there are a significant number of problems that need to be addressed. Another issue is certain "powers that be" in the United States government are reluctant to change.
In the January 21, 2008 Judiciary Report article entitled "The FBI Wiretapped 27 Million Calls In One Year" the site stated, "Recently, it was reported the FBI wiretapped 27 million phone calls in one year. Are there really that many terrorists in America. The country would cease to exist if there was that much terrorist activity in one year and not one terrorist has been caught via wiretapping...What were these 27 million calls about, then. No wonder the agency can't pay its phone bill."
This lack of focus, also showed itself in the terrorist watch list, as it has so many names on it, close to 1 million, how are they going to have the time to properly investigate everyone. So the names just sit there and people who belong on the more serious no fly list, do not get placed on it in a timely fashion. No one bothered to tackle the gross inaccuracies and shortcomings contained therein.
Barack Obama gets an 'F' for protecting Americans
December 30th, 2009 - There is no more solemn duty for an American commander-in-chief than the marshalling of “every element of our national power” – the phrase Obama himself used on Monday – to protect the people of the United States. In that key respect, Obama failed on Christmas Day, just as President George W. Bush failed on September 11th (though he succeeded in the seven years after that).
Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a “B+” for his 2009 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn into his underpants. He said today that a “systemic failure has occurred”. Well, he’s in charge of that system.
The picture we’re getting is more and more alarming by the hour. Here are some key elements to consider:
1. Abdulmutallab’s father spoke several times to the US Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria and visited a CIA officer there to tell him, apparently, that he feared his son was a jihadist being trained in Yemen. According to CNN, the CIA officer wrote up a report, which then sat in the CIA headquarters at Langley for several weeks without being disseminated to the rest of the intelligence community. This was not just a casual encounter. Again according to CNN, there were at least two face-to-face meetings, telephone calls and written correspondence with the father. If it’s true that the CIA sat on this then it beggars belief.
2. After 9/11, the huge bureaucracies of the Homeland Security Department and the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) were created. Inside the DNI, the National Counter Terrorism Center was created. These organisations were created to “connect the dots”. It may well be that the fault lay with NCTC and not the CIA – CIA spokesman George Little says here that “key biographical information” and information about “possible extremist connections in Yemen” was passed to NCTC. If NCTC knew about it, then did someone at the National Security Council within the White House? There’s a huge blame game beginning so we’ll no doubt know soon enough.
3. It wasn’t just the meeting with the father. According to CBS, “as early as August of 2009 the Central Intelligence Agency was picking up information on a person of interest dubbed ‘The Nigerian’ suspected of meeting with ‘terrorist elements’ in Yemen”. So there were other parts of the jigsaw that were not put together...
