These Aren't Leaders & They Will Get Americans Killed

The attempted Christmas bombing by al Qaeda linked Omar Abdulmutallab successfully bypassed all of the security precautions put in place since 9-11. This is a failure on Obama's watch. But as much as I think that Obama has unforgivably decimated our intelligence capabilities - something that will inevitably lead to future terrorist attacks for which he will be fully responsible - it is not apparent to me that this particular failure to stop this bombing before it came to the point of fruition is Obama's failure. The intelligence was there. It is beyond question that the individuals that should have connected the dots didn't. And it appears that airport security failed catastrophically in Amsterdam.

The appropriate response for Obama to this turn of events should have been simple - take responsibility, instruct his staff to identify the how and why of this failure and make recommendations to plug the holes. Once satisfied, he should then report to the American people. Instead, the Obama administration initially sent Janet Napolitano sent out to run defense, insanely claiming the "system worked." And now the White House is showing more of an inclination to treat this failure as a partisan political issue than to take responsibility and patch the security holes. This from the American Spectator is utterly unreal:

. . . senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns -- if any -- from the Bush Administration.

"The idea was that we'd show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could," says a staffer in the counsel's office. "We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we'd declassify it if necessary."

The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. Other administration sources also say a flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama's decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a "catastrophic" failure on Christmas Day.

"This White House doesn't view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it's a political issue," says the White House source. "That's why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue." . . .

The article goes on to note that Obama has Axelrod even sit in on national security briefings. Everything is politicized with these stooges - though that said, our far left crossed a bright red line in our political landscape when they politicized national security beginning in 2006, all in an effort to attain political power. These people aren't fit to lead a girl scout troupe.

The unforgivable aspect of the instant case is that Obama has treated Abdulmutallab as a criminal, giving him constitutional protection and allowing him to lawyer up rather than treating him as an enemy combatant subject to permanent detention and interrogation. Indeed, this is blatantly obvious to a vast majority of Americans. As Rassmusen reports:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day. . . .

Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters think the attempt by the Nigerian Muslim to blow up the airliner as it landed in Detroit should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act. Only 22% say it should be handled by civilian authorities as a criminal act, . . .

No kidding. Yet Obama, with his vacuous moral preening and unbounded intellectual arrogance, has elevated his personal beliefs over his Constitutional and moral duty to the protect our nation. All of the intelligence that our would be jihadist could give us on the al Qaeda cell that threatens America is no longer available because the three stooges pictured above want to, as Cheney so accurately said yesterday, pretend that we are no longer in a war on terror. So how has the Obama approach worked? This from Powerline, quoting varoious itterations of a WaPo article on the issue:

The Washington Post reports that the would-be Christmas bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, remains in a Detroit prison where, after initial debriefings by the FBI, he has "restricted his cooperation." The "restriction" occurred after he obtained a defense attorney. . . .

An earlier version of the Post's story included this statement: "Authorities are holding out hope that [Abdulmutallab] will change his mind and cooperate with the probe, the officials said." The Post removed the passage. Whether it did so out of embarrassment for the "officials" or for the newspaper itself is unclear. . . .

This is a travesty and American blood will be spilled because of it. Damn these people.