Posted on 01/02/2010 8:30:43 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Last week's failed plot to bomb a U.S. passenger jet has exposed lingering fissures within the U.S. intelligence community, which had information from interviews and clandestine intercepts but did not put the pieces together, officials said.
Turf wars between U.S. spy and law enforcement agencies are nothing new. But lapses that allowed a Nigerian suspect to board a Detroit-bound plane with a bomb on Christmas Day, and the finger-pointing that followed, have raised questions about sweeping changes made to improve security and intelligence- sharing after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
President Barack Obama has ordered preliminary findings by Thursday into what he described as a "systemic failure" by federal authorities for allowing the botched December 25 attack.
A senior aide said Obama would seek accountability at the highest levels, stoking fears in the intelligence community of a shake-up. Another official said the review would show "where the dots should have been connected" and why they were not.
Two officials said a focus of the White House review was what happened to intelligence after it was relayed to the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to collect, integrate and analyze the information as it is gathered.
U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said spy agencies picked up important information about the suspected would-be-bomber, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and about the intentions of al Qaeda leaders in Yemen, in the months before the attempted bombing.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
How could it be a “plot” if it was carried out by an “isolated extremist”?
Very good question. One I am sure that Obama has an answer for.
The NYT will always fault the intelligence agencies. I believe the blame rests mostly with the inidivduals who allowed a man, who bought a one-way ticket and paid for it in cash, to get on an international flight without a passport.
EXCLUSIVE: Obama Got Pre-Christmas Intelligence Briefing About Terror Threats to "Homeland"
That was the early story.
Obama promises justice for Christmas terror plotters
Video
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(CNN) -- President Obama pledged Saturday that the United States will hold accountable all of the individuals involved in the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack aboard a U.S.-bound jetliner.
He also highlighted his administration's attempts to crack down on extremist enclaves in Yemen and reiterated his longstanding promise to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al Qaeda.
"All those involved in the attempted act of terrorism on Christmas must know you, too, will be held to account," Obama said in his weekly address.
I think the latest is that he had an Italian passport, although how he was able to get hold of an Italian passport is yet another question.
Also, think they said the panty bomber had recently been to Texas....Where in Texas???
Who would want to be in the CIA, NSA, Secret Service or the FBI at this time? Budget cuts, MSM harping, and the threat of war crimes trials wouldn’t exactly boost anyone’s morale. Who would wanna stick their necks out for this administration???
They seemed to work pretty well. For nearly eight years we had no terror attacks. The Gorelick wall of separation was removed and the agencies shared intelligence much more freely. That all changed after January 20, 2009. The wall of separation was reinstalled and the agencies were told not to talk to one another again. So a more accurate sentence would be:
...have raised questions about sweeping changes made to improve security and intelligence- sharing after the January 20, 2009 inauguration.
But then, this is al-Reuters. What does one expect?
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was introduced on 5/18/1977 by Senator Ted Kennedy.
The bill was cosponsored by the nine Senators: Birch Bayh, James O. Eastland, Jake Garn, Walter Huddleston, Daniel Inouye, Charles Mathias, John L. McClellan, Gaylord Nelson, and Strom Thurmond. The act was signed into law by President Carter in 1978.
This Law was deemed necessary to protect the privacy of everybody in the U.S., even terrorists!
That law prohibited the US intelligence gathering agencies to share information related to terrorism under penalty of jail time and job loss.
Why do people still act puzzled that this resulted directly in the World Trade Center explosion in 1993, and eventually 911?
HELLO??!!
It's impossible to feel warm and fuzzy about the inviolability of your privacy, if you're dead.
Any big surprises here? The action of these individuals, judged by subsequent developments and the blood of thousands of real victims, speaks to the poverty of ideas, reason, and sense of proportion of all those individuals.
Of course, there are dozens of additional ignorant, criminal, elected fruitcakes who have modified this law a half dozen times and still can't see, never mind fix the problem.
The ones who are dead, good riddance.
The ones who are still alive should be stripped of their jobs and pensions, and be prohibited ever from holding office at any level.
Hell, I would think life terms for stupidity would not be inappropriate.
Again: "We meant well" is not an acceptable excuse for consummate stupidity, at the continuing cost of thousands of lives and millions of serious inconveniences.
One last note:
I see red when, in researching all truly incompetent laws, all subsequent official government citations, analyses and reports deliberately go out of their way NOT to list any the politicians responsible, and their party affiliations.
It took me a long time to find those names.
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Sometimes I feel that I'm in the Twilight Zone, in a frustrating universe like Alice's, to mix a metaphor.
What more can I say? The ugly and obvious combination of political correcteness coupled with the total blindness to the greatest good for the 99.999% of the people who are forced to pay the price with their lives: the American citizens.
Politicians and do-good, "feel-good" activists are free to play the odds with their personal lives and perhaps those of their own families, but not to insist on the same solution for an entire country of hundreds of millions.
For example, every time that it is discussed, the shooting down of a passenger airliner, when it is certain that a homicidal muslim maniac is determined to use the plane as a weapon, it is never the subject of a debate or even a discussion; the subject appears to be taboo, but the "solution" to shoot the airliner down silently deemed correct.
The conscious disconnect, and the cognitive dissonance is breathtaking.
Solutions?
Repeal even the suggestion that intelligence agencies are forbidden by law to share threat information for any reason whatseover! That has to be the among the most stupid and irrational political decisions in history.
Discuss openly, and in depth, the obvious reality that islam is not a religion like every other mainstream religion on earth (excluding the pathological, such as the Manson Family or Jim Jones' Jonestown mass "suicide.")
The likely conclusion of such a debate is to conclude that islam is not entitled to the "freedoms" afforded to other religions whose actions are not centered on violence, suicide, murder and mayhem.
This is the only yardstick with which to determine their status: always their actions, never their words, spoken or written.
The only difference between the "People's Temple" and islam is that, instead of being led by a single pathological nut case, islam is led by thousands
of them, worldwide.
Preventing all members of such a clearly homicidal religion entry into our country, for any reason, is a good place to start; as is the end of the mindblowing treatment that millions of traveling non-muslims must endure daily as the politically-correct alternative.
What about the man who viceotaped the entire flight?
I’m to shot to wade through the long posts today.
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