Some important links for today

From the Washington Post Politics:
Crist pulls way ahead of Rubio
Pelosi's enforcer not afraid to battle Rahmbo
Oil spill pits Palin against the Republican Party

From Washington Post AP news:
Supreme Court upholds anti-terror law
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court has upheld a U.S. law that bars "material support" to foreign terrorist organizations, rejecting a free speech challenge from humanitarian aid groups.
The court ruled 6-3 Monday that the government may prohibit all forms of aid to designated terrorist groups, even if the support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.
 
From Washington Post Foreign Service:
Iran bans 2 IAEA inspectors from entering Iran
 
Editorials and Op-Edsand columnists:
Obama's energy pipe dreams
Robert J. Samuelson

"Just once, it would be nice if a president would level with Americans on energy. Barack Obama isn't that president. His speech the other night was about political damage control -- his own. It was full of misinformation and mythology. Obama held out a gleaming vision of an America that would convert to the "clean" energy of, presumably, wind, solar and biomass. It isn't going to happen for many, many decades, if ever."

Barton's BP comments highlight GOP's propensity for gaffes
by Davis S. Broder (ed. note: I wish this weren't so true. Barton may have been correct but it was not the time to do the attention grabbing apology.)

The unreadiness team

THE REPORT is chilling. Optimistically titled "U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team Makes Progress in Securing Cyberspace, but Challenges Remain," it paints a disturbing picture of a national security disaster waiting to happen.

Is this supposed to be called treason?

I'm not sure of the definitions, but this is definitely not to be condoned.
From Wired.com:

U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe

By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.
He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”

If you read the rest of the article you see that this 22 year old punk truly thinks he  is entitled to leak security secrets because he knows best.  He is a true disciple of the lefists who came into being during the Vietnam war and were persuaded of their moral superiority over any honest American citizen. Read more here.

If you thought we had a few secrets left, you were wrong

This from The LA TIMES via Lucianne.com

Obama decides to unilaterally announce secret U.S. missile tests, satellite launches

  President Obama has decided to pre-announce to the world once-secret American ballistic missile tests and satellite launches.

The Democratic administration's goal is to show a friendlier face to other countries and to coax Russia to do the same.

It's part of a confidence-boosting initiative launched, so to speak, last fall when Obama suddenly abandoned the U.S. missile-defense system in Eastern Europe that had exercised the Russians, though it was aimed at potential future missiles from Iran.

Obama hoped such a unilateral U.S. forfeiture would encourage Russia to put pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear weapons development. So far no good on that.

Of course, the point of secret tests by any state in an insecure, suspicious world is to deny advance notice to potential enemies, making it more difficult if not impossible for them to gain intelligence by monitoring the tests themselves.

According to George Jahn of the Associated Press, a confidential U.S. note sent to 128 other countries two weeks ago said:

The United States ... will provide pre-launch notification of commercial and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space launches as well as the majority of intercontinental ballistic and submarine-launched ballistic missile launches.

Security experts note that Obama left himself some wiggle room by using the phrase "majority of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missile launches," many of which depart from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast.

Security experts note that Obama left himself some wiggle room by using the phrase "majority of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missile launches," many of which depart from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast.

Washington's hope is that Russia will resume doing the same.

Don't you just love that hope and change stuff?  

The New York Times and National Secrets

From Power Line

Boring from within (New York Times edition)

Solomon B. Watson IV was the top legal officer of the New York Times back in 2005 and 2006 when, notoriously, it published two stories compromising top-secret counterterrorism programs.

I wrote about what the Times had done at the time in "Exposure," as Gabriel Schoenfeld did in "Has the New York Times violated the Espionage Act?" Indeed, Schoenfeld's forthcoming book Necessary Secrets was inspired by the recurring issues raised by the Times's -- oh, let's say it --- violations of the Espionage Act.

The Obama administration has now nominated Watson to be general counsel of the Army. This has raised some questions in the minds of Senators John McCain and Jeff Sessions about how Mr. Watson might deal with issues of leaking and secrecy in his sensitive new post. In fact, in his confirmation hearings they gave him a hot grilling. There is no one more qualified than Schoenfeld to review Watson's responses to Senators McCain and Sessions. He analyzes them in "A secret keeper (and breaker)."

JOHN adds: Is this some kind of sick joke? How does a career spent at the New York Times qualify Solomon to be the Army's chief legal officer? It's one thing to make bad appointments, but, given the Times's history, it is hard to see this one as anything other than an intentional slap in the Army's face.

I have copied the whole post, not something I like to do. This one is so important and is not getting any publicity that I have seen. I guess we have been too busy with healthcare and allowed some bad stuff to sneak under the radar.

Richard Cohen asks, When Will the Administration Wake Up?

We are not as safe as we were under George W. Bush and President Obama and his co-horts are to blame.
Obama administration is tone-deaf to concerns about terrorism
by Richard Cohen

There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America's critics but the message sent to Americans themselves. When, oh when, will this administration wake up?

Read the rest here.

Christmas Day Bomber and the Rush to call it Criminal

Charles Krauthammer explains

"The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane -- that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration -- but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.

After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.

We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI). "

Krauthammer goes on to discuss what happened and why it was so dreadfully disastrous for our national security.  Read his whole editorial here

Are We Safer, Stronger, Smarter?

Several articles I read this morning are on how President Obama is just not good for our security, economy or healthcare. Here are some of them:
From Human Events
Obama, the Weak Horse
by Jed Babbin

Soon upon us will be the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration. It’s time to ask, are we safer or in more danger than we were a year ago?

By every objective measure -- what we know about Islamic terrorism, its intentions and capabilities -- the answer is no. We are far less safe now than we were then.

To ask how much danger are we in is fatuous. You may as well ask, “[H]ow much danger is there”? The president has taken actions that -- again objectively -- have increased our vulnerability tremendously. Two of the actions he took immediately after taking office prove the point. And the actions he and Attorney General Eric Holder have since taken only increase the danger. One of the first things the president did on taking office was to ban the “enhanced interrogation methods” used successfully during the Bush administration to gain current, actionable intelligence from terrorist prisoners....

 

....Last week, White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan said that we would still, on a case by case basis, release Gitmo detainees to Yemen....

 

.... Keeping Gitmo open -- and subjecting the enemy combatants there who can be tried to military commissions -- would keep us safer. But Obama rejects both ideas....

 

....Obama is a weak horse. His weakness is the weakness of all liberals, just as Ronald Reagan defined it: “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”...

 

The president believes we can talk terrorists out of terrorism. He might as well believe he could talk the Neytiri character in “Avatar” out of being blue. He has no understanding of how powerful the Islamofascist ideology is, how deeply-rooted or widespread.

 I've left out a lot of the article between the ellipses and the rest beyond here. Be sure to read it all, Jed Babbin is always an insightful read.

From American Thinker Pam Geller of the Atlas Shrugs blog:
Obama Aids the Enemy He Will Not Name

White House National Security Adviser James Jones warned that Americans would feel "a certain shock" after reading the report on the Islamic jihadist who hid bombs in his crotch and tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 in Detroit on Christmas Day.

Well, I was shocked. (see Rockport Conservatives)

The loudest (deafening, actually) part of Obama's remarks Thursday on the war on the West is what he didn't say. Not once in Obama's self-aggrandizing speech on the Muslim Christmas bomber did he ever mention jihad or Islam.

And that is whom we are at war with.

To say that al-Qaeda alone is the enemy is just more obfuscation and deception. It's bureaucratic boilerplate.

Go read it all!
Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and is former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (Simon & Schuster).
 
From AP via Yahoo News:
In Hasan case, superiors ignored their own worries
By Richard Lardner

A Defense Department review of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has found the doctors overseeing Maj. Nidal Hasan's medical training repeatedly voiced concerns over his strident views on Islam and his inappropriate behavior, yet continued to give him positive performance evaluations that kept him moving through the ranks.

The picture emerging from the review ordered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates is one of supervisors who failed to heed their own warnings about an officer ill-suited to be an Army psychiatrist, according to information gathered during the internal Pentagon investigation and obtained by The Associated Press. The review has not been publicly released. Read it all here.

So many families would be whole today had we not had PC, Obama pushed policies that said we should not pursue security questions just because someone was an Isalmist.
 
From The Washington Times:
Editorial- Obama Justice Department Sanctioned
There is something very wrong about the Division on Civil Rights

There needs to be a housecleaning at the very troubled Justice Department, and the top echelons of the Civil Rights Division is the right place to start. Its division chief - a presidential appointee - and its highly politicized senior career employees promote liberal ideology more than they enforce the law.

The latest imbroglio concerns two of the division's top career lawyers, the ones whom the Obama team chose to run the division until controversial nominees Thomas Perrelli and Thomas Perez could be confirmed. The two officials, Loretta King and Steven H. Rosenbaum, were heavily involved (along with Mr. Perrelli) in dropping an already-won voter-intimidation case against several members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, and both were responsible for other, questionable race-based decisions. On Dec. 30, a federal district court in Kansas sanctioned them for misconduct. Read it all.

EDITORIAL: Obama's havoc to the intel system

President Obama blamed "the system" for failing to stop al Qaeda's Christmas Day bombing plot. The weakness with that excuse is that Mr. Obama fails to connect the dots between the systemic failure and his administration's year-long record of destroying the morale of the intelligence community.

The intelligence process works in large part because of trust. A reliable sense of confidence must exist between superiors and subordinates, agents and sources, and the intelligence community and policy makers. Without trust, people will not take the risks needed to do their jobs successfully.

Mr. Obama has destroyed this sense of trust. On his watch, the intelligence community has suffered a year of body blows. He made great theater of signing an executive order closing the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In April, the president authorized the release of the so-called "torture memos" on enhanced interrogation techniques used against detainees, and suggested that Congress establish a bipartisan review panel to look into the authorization of extraordinary interrogation methods.

Read the rest.
 
That's it for now. Real life calls. Read all the links.

A Constitutional Crisis and Security Crisis

So says Andy Mc Carthy in National Review The Constitutional Crisis and the Security Crisis
On detainees, either ignore the judges or rein them in.

We do not want a situation where the executive is defying the courts,” a senior Obama administration official told the Washington Post. The spokesman was rationalizing the administration’s release of jihadist detainees, who are returning to the jihad and targeting Americans. Such defiance, said the official, would be “a recipe for a constitutional crisis.” Evidently, the president doesn’t appreciate that we already have a constitutional crisis.

These are not just bad decisions. They amount to a scandal. Let’s count the ways.

CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS

First, there is the matter of the ongoing constitutional crisis that, as al-Qaeda’s attempted Christmas Day attack amply demonstrates, is now endangering our nation. The Constitution gives the political branches plenary responsibility for the conduct of war. The conduct of war includes the detention, trial, or release of enemy combatants. The federal courts have no role except the one they have usurped. This brazen power grab flouts the bedrock constitutional separation of powers, and the political branches do not have to abide it. Indeed, as national defense is their chief responsibility, it is their duty not to abide it.

This is a long article, well worth reading.

On National Security by A J Strata

I know I have quoted this man a lot lately but he knows what he is talking about. Today he analyses what went wrong and why the dots were not connected.
One Key Problem With Our National Security – It Turned Bureaucratic

One of the major problems with a heavy government hand in key national activities is the tendency for the bureaucrats to take over and lose site of the primary mission. Surprisingly, you find the private sector folks (bias alert, that would be people like me) much more willing to take chances, push the career risk to try something and see if it works or fails, and to ignore building organizations (verses building solutions).

As Rush would say here, "right on, right on."

I was reading up on the 2009 Intelligence Strategy document put out in August by the Director of National Intelligence (the organization created to connect the dots, which runs the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)) and it has some disturbing priorities. To provide some context I must note this document was being published just as young Abdulmutallab was entering Yemen for his training with al Qaeda and months before the Ft Hood massacre. So this document is a good sign of the Obama administration’s focus prior to these re-aligning events. A focus developed from the time they took office to August when the report was produced.

This is just a teaser - go read what he says.

UPDATE: Apparently J. Brennan & E. Holder Turned Down The Sensitivity Of Our National Security Network   Very Important, click title link to read.
By AJStrata on Surveillance: Posted on: Sun, Jan 3 2010 1:47 PM

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.