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Thursday, December 31, 2009

Extreme Intel/Security Failures

I am not an expert on security, the government or much of anything else. A. J. Strata is. Read what he says about the holes in our security, holes put there on purpose.

A Smoking Gun Dot In President’s Report On Flight 253 Intel Failures
Today we are gaining more and more clarity on the missteps that led up to a Nigerian Jihadist, who was armed with a powerful and sophisticated stealth bomb and trained by al Qaeda in Yemen, coming seconds away from inflicting a Christmas Day Massacre on Flight 253 over Detroit. And two things are becoming quickly apparent.

First is the glaring fact that news media is clueless about how things like intelligence gathering and the federal bureaucracy work. The root cause of this ignorance is because news reporters are inexperienced and unskilled spectators trying to grasp and convey these complex issues and actions to the public – and they do a terrible job of it. It is also due to the fact many of them are very much emotionally tied to this President as doe-eyed supporters (which is why you need political diversity on stories – not just in news rooms – to generate fair and balanced reporting). Biased and naive reporting seems to be the rule of thumb on this event.

The second aspect of this fiasco coming into focus is how the Obama administration changed the tone and pace of the war on terror. Toning down the ‘war on terror’ to a criminal investigation of ‘man-made-disasters’ has major impacts on our defenses. It fundamentally changes to nature of ‘the system’ which Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano infamously claimed had ‘worked’. Maybe it ‘worked’ as designed in its newer, lower key form. But it did not work in protecting this nation from attack....

....The presumption was that all available information would be looked at. That is how the system used to work. One member of the team relied on the other member to do their job the way they always have been. So what changed at NCTC that stopped a full background check of Abdulmutallab? Was it as this State Department source said – orders form the new Obama team to not profile Muslims:

This employee says that despite statements from the Obama Administration, such information was flagged and given higher priority during the Bush Administration, but that since the changeover “we are encouraged to not create the appearance that we are profiling or targeting Muslims. (Rockport Conservative emphasis)
These paragraphs are just a portion of the post, go read the whole thing for the whole story, and be sure to read the updates. I check The Stratasphere daily, sometimes more than once. I trust his to know what he is talking about.

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