Posted on Wednesday, 6th January 2010 by Roland_Melnick
Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan announced Tuesday that, in light of the attempted Detroit bombing, TSA screeners performing the mother of all invasive searches will now employ two fingers, not one.
.
I feel safer already.
Of course, the key isn’t how they search, but who they search. As we’ve seen, the story has been hashed and re-hashed. It’s clear there existed plenty of assets and plenty of warning signs in place to prevent Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from reaching the point where he’s re-enacting a SNL Night at the Roxbury dance scene Northwest Fight 253′s seat 18C.
I don’t blame guys like the one depicted above. Chances are he’s trying his best to follow his training and decent work ethic in order to help and protect the travelers under his charge. The real problem lies with the policy makers and strategists who define the job for the men and women in the trenches. Comments I’ve heard from several of those lofty folks the past two weeks have utterly decimated my faith in the system.
Last Sunday’s talk shows left me reaching for the barf bag. Sunday’s edition of “Fox and Friends” put on a panel of three guys…one was a top official with the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations…another was a top official with the TSA’s labor union. I can’t remember their names, nor the third panelist…my stomach forced me to change channels. Predictably, and sickeningly, both union officials did nothing more than push their own agendas; vowing that more resources and money thrown at the problem will be the cure-all much like the overhyped, and possibly fabricated, clamor for full-body scanners. You know, this terror thing, it’s nothing a few billion dollars can’t fix…a big government point of view shared by far too many politicians of both parties.
Moving from bad to worse, we have the ethicallly challenged John Brennan , who went on Meet the Press to proclaim there was “no smoking gun” in available intelligence reports that indicated Abdulmutallab’s attack on Northwest flight 253 was “imminent.” Adding, “There was no piece of intelligence that said, ‘This guy’s a terrorist. He’s going to get on a plane. It was the failure to integrate and piece together those bits and pieces of information.”
Excuse me while I say “WTF?” Brennan’s the #2 at NSA?!?! How many terror attacks, domestic and foreign, must we endure before guys like this “expert” realize we rarely have such warning…particularly with operations carried out by far-reaching, experienced organizations like al-Qaida.
Which begs the question, why must we wait for an attack to be imminent for us to take specific action against an individual?
How hard would it have been to put Abdulmutallab on the “No Fly, Do Not Enter, No Fucking Way” list? Seems pretty basic to me. We’ve all seen the litany of red flags raised around this guy from concerns raised by his father months earlier to his own actions the day of the planned terror operation. While we’re not letting him within a mile of a US-bound airliner, we have considerably more time to investigate what this jerk is plotting to do.
Add to the unrealistic and reckless “imminent” standard, Brennan’s tremendously poor metaphor of “smoking gun” when talking about preventing future terror attacks. This is the dangerous mindset of our current leaders about which our former Vice President Dick Cheney warned us.
Uh, excuse me, Mr. Brennan…if the gun is smoking, you’ve already failed.
Posted in Barack Obama, War on Terror | Comments (3) |
3 Responses to “Deputy Nat’l Security Advisor Brennan Unveils New Airport Security Strategy”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
January 6th, 2010 at 6:08 am
Next time I fly I’ll be bringing a note from my doctor saying I already had my exam.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Hey, after they caught the shoe bomber the TSA started making us take off our shoes to scan them. Now that they caught the underwear bomber…
January 7th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
[...] initial reaction to the attempted bombing on the Detroit-bound flight that we got from the Obama Administration was a combination of denying we are at war, denying that this guy was connected to a larger terror [...]