You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that the Obama Administration’s policies toward the CIA were going to make us less safe and be directly responsible for assisting the success of a terrorist attack. In fact, you only had to be Robert Graham from Naperville, Illinois. He wrote four months ago in a Letter to the Editor of the Chicago Daily Herald:
When President Obama took office we were fighting a war on terror against the Taliban and al-Qaida. That’s all changed now.
The Obama administration has decided to declare war on the CIA. Attorney General Eric Holder appointed federal prosecutor John Durham to investigate CIA interrogators and contractors suspected of abusing suspected terrorists in 2002 and 2003 even though the president previously had assured CIA officers that they would not be prosecuted.
This could distract the CIA from its national security responsibilities and release highly sensitive information to the nation’s enemies. The president believes it is more important to shore up his popularity with his leftist base than to let the CIA continue to fight the war on terror.
Robert is right and we only have one man’s inability to successfully immolate his testicles to thank for the safe landing of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. You see, the CIA can’t cover your ass while they’re distracted covering their own.
It wasn’t enough that the Bush Administration made the CIA’s job more difficult by releasing “rehabilitated” terrorists into the custody of the Saudis (who themselves are targets for anal bombs), so that they could be freed entirely to join Al-Qaeda in Yemen; now we have a President who is more concerned with castigating the CIA than castrating terrorists. The CIA can Cover Its Ass or cover yours, and the events of the last month have shown us that the distracted CIA couldn’t even prevent a vetted asset–undoubtedly carrying a diaper/underwear/crotch/anal bomb of his own–from killing seven of their own.
If the CIA’s best and brightest in a forward military base with premiere security worthy of a war zone can’t prevent a supposedly known quantity from murdering operatives that can’t be replaced, what chance does a gate attendant in Amsterdam have of keeping you safe? The only excuse we’ve been given in both cases is that beyond all sanity, neither men were searched very thoroughly.
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Nora
Christopher
retrieverman
Kali
Lori Ziemba
Jes
Leon Panetta’s head is going to roll over this one.
I don’t know why they he got to be head of the CIA in the first place. Politicians should never head this agency. Never.
Jimmy Carter tried to get Ted Sorensen this position. It’s usually said that his connection to the Kennedys is why he didn’t get it.
The real reason is that nobody would have confirmed Sorensen. He was a political figure.
The CIA director should come from someone who is an intelligence professional. I think the mistake was when George Bush the elder was given this directorship by Gerald Ford, which is why Carter thought he could get Sorensen appointed.
And yes, you know what my political views are.
I don’t think this has much to do with leftists (who are in an extreme minority, unless you’re talking about Boston, Boulder, and Berkeley). I think it has more to do with the fact that Obama gave patronage job to someone when the position requires a true professional.
BTW, I’ve read later reports that the officials at Amsterdam misspelled Mutallab. If they had spelled it correctly, it would have appeared on the terror watch list database.
It seems to me that the terror watch list database needs to have a feature like Google and Wikipedia have. If I spell something wrong, they will give me similar spellings.
.-= retrieverman´s last blog ..Golden pheasants square off in the Kew Gardens =-.
It’s rather like the Coroner. WTF is the CORONER a politically elected position!?!
I don’t think that a firing is the answer per se, even though I wasn’t particularly thrilled with old Leon getting this job, it’s clear that the disarray and distraction is now leading to failures. I think dropping the witch hunt should be the first step.
Except richerd reid got on when the cia had free reign. Botom line is NO system is perfect. Any system would work if we were always right. The true test of any system occures when we are wrong.
Yes! Richard Reid is the very reason this most recent event shouldn’t have happened. We already got one swing at bat on this type of attack and we were lucky last time that the nervous Reid was delayed a day, perspired too much, and got his fuse damp.
Also remember that Reid was only months after 9/11/2001, on December 22, 2001. The government was still decompiling what happened and preparing for war, and trying to work up profiles on the new technique of hijacking for purpose of making the plane a bomb itself.
Both then and now, we have a CIA that has had recent turnover of administration. Except now, the CIA is distracted not by the largest attack on US soil ever, but by the Obama administration launching a witch hunt on them.
And – the person who was directly responsible for stopping the attack was a courageous and alert passenger – so, of course the administration follows up with a mandate that from this point forward, all passengers must remain seated during terrorist attacks.
F*** ‘em. If someone tries to hijack or bomb a plane I’m on, they’ll find out why man-eating rottweilers fear me.