President Obama was warned about a Christmastime terror threat before he traipsed off to Hawaii. So the Christmas day attempted attack on Northwest 253 came as no surprise to him and his administration. You’d think they would have had a better response prepared, seeing that they had plenty of time to prepare one. And you’d think they would have warned the American people.
Newsweek reported:
President Barack Obama received a high-level briefing only three days before Christmas about possible holiday-period terrorist threats against the US, Newsweek has learned. The briefing was centered on a written report, produced by US intelligence agencies, entitled “Key Homeland Threats”, a senior US official said.
The senior Administration official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that nowhere in this document was there any mention of Yemen, whose Al-Qaeda affiliate is now believed to have been behind the unsuccessful Christmas Day attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a transatlantic airliner with a bomb hidden in his underpants. However, the official declined to disclose any other information about the substance of the briefing, including what kind of specific warnings, if any, the President was given about possibly holiday attacks and whether Yemen came up during oral discussions.
According to the senior official, the holiday threat briefing, one in a series of regularly-scheduled sessions with top counter-terrorism officials, was held in the White House Situation Room on December 22. Present were representatives of agencies involved in counter-terrorism policy and operations, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and FBI Director Robert Mueller. The CIA and National Intelligence Directors Office were represented by deputy agency heads: CIA deputy director Steven Kappes, and David Gompert, the principal deputy to National Intelligence Czar Dennis Blair. Also present was Michael Leiter, director of the National Counter-terrorism Center, a unit of the Intelligence Czar’s office which was created after 9/11 to ensure that intelligence reporting about possible terrorist plots was shared quickly among all US agencies who might have some capability to do something about it.
This is scary because it illustrates how hapless the bureaucracy is at keeping us safe. They were informed about the Nigerian by his own father. The guy was flying on Christmas with NO LUGGAGE but somehow was able to make it onto an airplane bound for the US while wearing exploding underwear. All this when they KNEW something was going to happen.
No doubt they’ll continue to blame it on Bush.
Via Gateway Pundit, via memeorandum
The way I’m beginning to see this is, Janet Napolitano should be FIRED immediately with no questions asked. Second, Barack Obama should come before the American people and admit he is in over his head and doesn’t know what he’s doing, and apparently from the time it took him to address the situation publicly he doesn’t care. C’mon, why should be bothered by such silly things as the war on terror, Muslim extremist while he’s golfing, playing basketball, taking long walks on the beach, and I’ll be damned if that keeps him from snorkeling.
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The Obama administration is revealing itself daily as being the greatest terror threat to the American people. The risk assessment level of their incompetence increases by the second.
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Michigan! Is so right.
It seems to me that it would be common sense and the sort of thing any office manager would do to craft various responses to various things—so that IF something happens, you have a statement to the nation that is brief but available immediately with minor tweaking. This is certainly the case in the casino business I work in: like obituaries of famous people, shells are already written to deal with various scenarios and you just fill in the particulars to get something out there to the public asap.
Considering all of the security debacles that occurred this year, I cannot fathom that there is not ONE competent speechwriter on this team who wouldn’t have that contingency in his pocket. It’s just what you DO, as a professional. Oh, I forget—these people are professional “nothing”, having only run for office and not actually run any kind of business.
That little point disturbs me more than anything else that’s happened. If you don’t have a contingency plan for a brief, urgently needed general statement to the public—I’m pretty sure you have no contingency plan to deal with the disaster, either.
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