Krauthammer On Obama's OJT & 9-10 Mentality

The Washington Post's op-ed section opens the New Year - and the New Decade - on fire. First, Charles Krauthammer weighs in, excoriating the Obama regime for its 9-10 mindset. Then Bill Kristol writes on why we should be lending full support to Iran's revolution and what forms that support should take. I have made the same arguments repeatedly in this blog, so its nice to see the heavy hitters weighing in likewise. To Krauthammer first:

Janet Napolitano -- former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security -- will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: "The system worked." The attacker's concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son's jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.

Heck of a job, Brownie.

It was beyond outrageous for our DHS Chief to make a claim that logically implies that acts of God and jihadi incompetence are central parts of our "system" for defeating terrorism. Neither she nor Obama seem to understand that leadership requires not political spin, but a "buck stops here" mentality. They are taking the buck, making it into a paper airplane, and tossing it out the window as fast as they can. And indeed, Napolitano, a purely political animal with no security experience, needs to be removed for the sake of our national security. Doing the same to the entire Obama administration will need to await 2012.

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York -- a trifecta of political correctness and image management.

And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." It's over -- that is, if it ever existed.

Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."

And produces linguistic -- and logical -- oddities that littered Obama's public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as "an isolated extremist." This is the same president who, after the Fort Hood, Tex., shooting, warned us "against jumping to conclusions" -- code for daring to associate the mass murder there with Nidal Hasan's Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the would-be bomber acted alone.

Clearly, this on the job training isn't working out so well. Obama is determined to treat terrorism under a 9-10 mindset and punish the Bushies for doing otherwise. His decision to allow a special prosecutor for CIA interrogators will, I think in retrospect, be the single most destructive decision in all of this. The message to the CIA was, if you follow orders and push the envelope at all, then what was lawful under one administration could lead to your prosecution when administrations change. Nothing else Obama could have done will have such a devestating and long term effect on our national security.

More jarring still were Obama's references to the terrorist as a "suspect" who "allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device." . . .

Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point -- surprise! -- he stops talking.

That is, as I pointed out in a post here, the penultimate travesty of Obama's acts in regards to this latest terrorist attempt. The American people seem to realize precisely the same thing. According to Rasmussen, 71% of Americans think Abdulmutallab should be in military custody, without a lawyer and U.S. Constitutional protections, and subject to interrogations. Indeed, a full 58% of Americans think this jihadi should be being waterboarded as we speak.

This absurdity renders hollow Obama's declaration that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved." Once we've given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him. . . .

The president said that this incident highlights "the nature of those who threaten our homeland." But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as "extremist[s]."

A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy -- jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon -- turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

As I point out here, rather than address these security issues and rethink his position, Obama is now trying to defend his indefensible acts by searching for anything in the Bush administrations history that might show that they reacted even less appropriately than Obama to a similar situation. Indeed, if the American Spectator is reporting this accurately, Obama is quite willing to declassify secret information in this regard if it will help him with his political spin. There can be no question that this man is not merely weak in terms of national security, he is every bit as clueless as his Secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security. He will get Americans killed, it is only a matter of time.

On a final note, I always check the comments to Krauthammer articles - at least a page of them. No one brings out the fire breathing, utterly incoherent far lefties from under their slime encrusted rocks like Krauthammer. That said, I was more than surprised to see that the vast majority of comments to this article are in support of Krauthammer's position. Between Rasmussen's poll that I reference above and the comments to Krauthammer's article, I really am beginning to sense a groundswell in America the likes of which we haven't seen for more than a decade or more. 2012 can't get here fast enough.

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These Aren't Leaders & They Will Get Americans Killed

The attempted Christmas bombing by al Qaeda linked Omar Abdulmutallab successfully bypassed all of the security precautions put in place since 9-11. This is a failure on Obama's watch. But as much as I think that Obama has unforgivably decimated our intelligence capabilities - something that will inevitably lead to future terrorist attacks for which he will be fully responsible - it is not apparent to me that this particular failure to stop this bombing before it came to the point of fruition is Obama's failure. The intelligence was there. It is beyond question that the individuals that should have connected the dots didn't. And it appears that airport security failed catastrophically in Amsterdam.

The appropriate response for Obama to this turn of events should have been simple - take responsibility, instruct his staff to identify the how and why of this failure and make recommendations to plug the holes. Once satisfied, he should then report to the American people. Instead, the Obama administration initially sent Janet Napolitano sent out to run defense, insanely claiming the "system worked." And now the White House is showing more of an inclination to treat this failure as a partisan political issue than to take responsibility and patch the security holes. This from the American Spectator is utterly unreal:

. . . senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns -- if any -- from the Bush Administration.

"The idea was that we'd show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could," says a staffer in the counsel's office. "We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we'd declassify it if necessary."

The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. Other administration sources also say a flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama's decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a "catastrophic" failure on Christmas Day.

"This White House doesn't view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it's a political issue," says the White House source. "That's why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue." . . .

The article goes on to note that Obama has Axelrod even sit in on national security briefings. Everything is politicized with these stooges - though that said, our far left crossed a bright red line in our political landscape when they politicized national security beginning in 2006, all in an effort to attain political power. These people aren't fit to lead a girl scout troupe.

The unforgivable aspect of the instant case is that Obama has treated Abdulmutallab as a criminal, giving him constitutional protection and allowing him to lawyer up rather than treating him as an enemy combatant subject to permanent detention and interrogation. Indeed, this is blatantly obvious to a vast majority of Americans. As Rassmusen reports:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day. . . .

Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters think the attempt by the Nigerian Muslim to blow up the airliner as it landed in Detroit should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act. Only 22% say it should be handled by civilian authorities as a criminal act, . . .

No kidding. Yet Obama, with his vacuous moral preening and unbounded intellectual arrogance, has elevated his personal beliefs over his Constitutional and moral duty to the protect our nation. All of the intelligence that our would be jihadist could give us on the al Qaeda cell that threatens America is no longer available because the three stooges pictured above want to, as Cheney so accurately said yesterday, pretend that we are no longer in a war on terror. So how has the Obama approach worked? This from Powerline, quoting varoious itterations of a WaPo article on the issue:

The Washington Post reports that the would-be Christmas bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, remains in a Detroit prison where, after initial debriefings by the FBI, he has "restricted his cooperation." The "restriction" occurred after he obtained a defense attorney. . . .

An earlier version of the Post's story included this statement: "Authorities are holding out hope that [Abdulmutallab] will change his mind and cooperate with the probe, the officials said." The Post removed the passage. Whether it did so out of embarrassment for the "officials" or for the newspaper itself is unclear. . . .

This is a travesty and American blood will be spilled because of it. Damn these people.

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Cheney Unleashed On The 9-10 Mindset; The Left Tries To Rewrite History

In the wake of the attempted Christmas Day bombing by would be jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Dick Cheney goes feral on the Obama administration over their 9-10 mindset. This from the Politico:

. . . Here is Cheney’s full statement:

"As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war."

Cheney as ususal, is dead on point. As I posted the other day, the worst part of this is that now, the Obama administration, having bestowed constitutional rights on this would be jihadist and, concomitantly, having allowed him to lawyer up, our chances of getting actionable intelligence have dropped substantially. As I have written before, Obama's moral compass - the one he so ostentatiously points to at every opportunity - is faulty indeed. His first moral, ethical and Constitutional duty is to protect the U.S. Period.

But it was inevitable that some idiots on the left would crawl from under their slime encrusted rocks to blame Bush. And indeed, they appear today at Hotline On Call:

. . . While many Dems stay silent and let the WH lead the way, DCCC chair Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) say the previous admin let down their guard.

"In general, we are facing the consequences of the Bush administration's failures to deal with al Qaeda," Van Hollen told Hotline OnCall. "The Republicans have no business in pointing fingers at the Obama administration on terrorism and national security."

"The Obama administration has been much more aggressive about going after al Qaeda than the Bush administration, which turned its focus from al Qaeda to Iraq," he added. The Obama admin has "been on the offense in places where the Bush administration had taken its eye off the ball."

Meanwhile, Massa has taken on ex-VP Dick Cheney, who he says is directly responsible for releasing the top al Qaeda figures in Yemen who aided and trained the Nigerian-born suspect.

"I would remind the American public that the apparent leaders of the al Qaeda cell in Yemen were 2 terrorists who were released by Vice President Cheney in secret. I think there's a level of accountability that has to be levied personally on the vice president," Massa said in an interview. "He is personally responsible for that."

Not since Stalin rewrote the history of the communist movement in Russia has there been such a blatant attempt at a historical rewrite. Or maybe not since the left tried to rewrite themselves out of the vote for the Iraq war. Hmmm, or maybe not since Pelosi tried to rewrite the history of her CIA briefings on waterboarding . . .? Well, whatever, let's deal with the historical rewrite being attempted at hand. As to the claim that the left has been far more "aggressively" going after al Qaeda," than the right ever has, that turns history on its head, pulls it inside out, runs it through a meat grinder and tosses it into an industrial strength trash compactor.

The U.S. Congress near unanimously voted for war authorization for Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan fell and al Qaeda was all but driven out from there within months of 9-11. Iraq fell in weeks once the war started. It was a year and some months later when al Qaeda, at the top of their Muslim-wide popularity, explicitly made Iraq the centerpiece of their efforts. They wanted to drive America out of Iraq. In this, they were aided and abetted by the Democrats who did their absolute best to surrender to al Qaeda at whatever would have been the cosmic cost to our national security. Who can forget the Senate Majority Leader officially surrendering to al Qaeda after two bloody suicide bombings in April, 2007:



Obama himself was quite willing to see a genocide in Iraq if we would only surrender to al Qaeda there. We didn't - only because of George Bush. In the end, our military defeated al Qaeda in their theater of choice, Iraq. The al Qaeda brand was humiliated throughout the Middle East.

The Predator Drone strikes that Obama is now using to kill al Qaeda leaders didn't start in January 2009. That program began under Bush. Indeed, as near as I can tell, there is not a single new program undertaken by Obama to target al Qaeda. At any rate, in sum, for the utter scum on the left - those who placed a raw grab for political power over our national security - to now claim that they have always been the better guardians of our national security is to tell an obscene fairy tale.

As an aside, the reason al Qaeda is still extant - though very much near the ebb of its power - has everything to do with Bush AND Obama AND Congress down both aisles. Al Qaeda is as much an idea based on Salafism as it is a loose organization, and until that idea is altered, we are going to be playing whack-a-mole with al Qaeda whereever they can find a failed state to hide in. Nothing our government has done yet has addressed the toxin of Salafism spreading throughout the world on the backs of Saudi petrodollars. As I have said ad infinitum on this blog, our war against al Qaeda will continue ever on until we engage in the war of ideas.

Ok, back to Rep. Massa and his one semi-valid point in what is otherwise a massive steaming pile of bull excreata:

I would remind the American public that the apparent leaders of the al Qaeda cell in Yemen were 2 terrorists who were released by Vice President Cheney in secret.

It is true the Bush administration released these two "leaders" of the al Qaeda cell at issue - though the "in secret" bit is utterly ridiculous. It was well known at the time that the Bush administration were releasing Gitmo detainees who they thought no longer posed a threat and/or could be dealt with in their home countries. I hadn't, before today, heard a single Democrat object to that. This was an experiment that has worked in some cases, not in others. Apparently, the recidivism rate has been about 15%.

The two men Massa refers to, Said Ali Shari and Muhamad Attik al-Harbi, were released from Gitmo to Saudi Arabia in 2007. The Saudis promised to detain them until they were rehabilitated. Shari was "rehabilitated," then went to Yemen to become a leader of the al Qaeda cell there. Al-Marbi, though named by Massa and initially thought to have done the same, in fact was no longer involved with the Yemeni al Qaeda cell.

Why were these men - and indeed - anyone in Guantamo ever released? We always had the option to keep every Guantamo detainee under permanent detention until the end of hostilities. That, by 2006, is what had every leftwing nut near a microphone going into full moonbat mode, accusing the Bush administration of everything from violating the Constitution to committing war crimes. Indeed, it is this same group of moonbats that had, until about yesterday, planned to send close to 100 Gitmo grads to Yemen in the coming weeks so that they can close Gitmo at all costs. Where is Massa on that one? Need anyone ask?

But no matter. The real problem is the 9-10 mindset, as Cheney points out. And whether Gitmo-grad Shari took part in the planning of the Christmas bombing or not is merely a collateral attack on Cheney. It has nothing to do with whether Cheney's criticims of Obama are valid. They are.

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Bob Baer, Obama & The Real Travesty Of The Attempted Chrismas Bombing

The video below is of ex CIA agent Robert Baer discussing the terrorist attempt to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to the U.S. on Christmas Day. Interestingly enough, Baer predicted just such an attack three years ago. That this attack occurred shows serious systemic failures in our secruity apparatus, but that is not the real travesty. Do see the video.



(H/T Hot Air) As Baer makes clear, this bombing attempt arose out of an "organization" - a Yemeni al Qaeda cell - that was capable of both planning an operation to defeat airport security and building a sophisticated bomb. It was an attempt that only failed by the grace of God. Jihadist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was in direct contact with that 'organization' and the 'organization' presents an ongoing threat to America. Thus, to remain safe, the U.S. needs every piece of intelligence it can extract from Mr. Abdulmutallab about it. Yet the Obama administration is treating Abdulmutallab as a common criminal, not a prisoner of war. The Obama administration has already arraigned Abdulmutallab - indeed, the administration did it within two days of the attack. This means that Abdulmutallab now has a lawyer and nothing of timely intelligence value will be forthcoming. This is utter insanity.

To state again, under the rules of war, we have every right to hold combatants for the duration of hostilities. In other words, we are within our rights to hold Abdulmutallab until his age reaches triple digits so long as hostilities have not ceased. And we are within our rights to interrogate him for information every day he is in custody - no lawyers allowed, no constitutional rights at issue (well, but see Boumadiene). There is no reason whatsoever to put a combatant to trial unless you have an additional goal of trying them for war crimes and executing them. By placing this Abdulmutallab in the criminal system unnecessarily, Obama has kneecapped our ability to get actionable intelligence that might stop the next attack from this 'organization.' As bad as are all of the other issues surrounding this attempted bombing, this is the worst.

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"Try Them Or Release Them?" How About Reading Them Their Rights?

President Obama’s proposal for a new legal system in which terrorism suspects could be held in “prolonged detention” inside the United States without trial would be a departure from the way this country sees itself, as a place where people in the grip of the government either face criminal charges or walk free.

NYT, President’s Detention Plan Tests American Legal Tradition, 22 May 2009

Oh, leftie heads are about to explode. The Obama Administration, in its latest Friday bad news dump, took the Bush position in its brief filed with the Supreme Court yesterday that, even though a federal court has ordered that the seventeen Uighur Chinese currently being held at Guantanamo must be released, federal Courts have no power to order them released in the United States. According to the Obama DOJ, they can retained at Guantanamo indefinitely until a suitable country agrees to take them. All those lefties who have been crying 'try them or release them' are going to need therapy.

That said, Obama is in fact moving away from Bush in one very critical area. He is returning us to the failed 9-10 law enforcement model to combat radical Islamic terrorism.

This from Andy McCarthy at the NRO:

The Uighurs, Chinese Muslim detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, received terrorist training at al Qaeda affiliated camps . . . and were captured after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. They are the Left's combatant cause célèbre. The military took the incoherent position that they were trained al Qaeda terrorists but that their real beef was with China, not us. Thus, the federal courts have held that they are not enemy combatants. The government has been trying to relocate them for years but no country will take the remaining 17 — other than China, where our treaty obligations arguably forbid us from sending them because there is reason to believe they'd be persecuted.

Of course, it's one thing to say that they are not enemy combatants and should therefore be released. It is quite another thing, though, to say that they should be released into the United States (which, because of their terrorist affiliations, would violate federal immigration law). . . . [F]ederal judge Richard Urbina did try to order their release into the U.S. (Here at NRO, the editors weighed in on Judge Urbina's absurd decision, here.) Fortunately, in a well reasoned decision authored by Judge Raymond Randolph . . . the DC Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Judge Urbina, holding that just because courts have the power to review whether a prisoner is properly designated an enemy combatant does not mean they have the power to order the release into the United States of those found not to be enemy combatants.

The Uighurs appealed, and today the Justice Department filed its responsive brief. Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued — consistent with the Bush administration position — that the Uighurs have no right to be released into the U.S. As Lyle Denniston recaps at SCOTUSblog:

The brief holds to the position of the Bush Administration that a court’s power to issue a remedy in a habeas case — in the wake of the Supreme Court’s mandate that the detainees have a constitutional right to seek their freedom — is limited to a finding of eligibility for release, without an actual release from captivity while diplomatic negotiations to resettle a prisoner continue. . . .

Read the entire article. Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth commence.

But it would seem that there might be wailing and gnashing on both sides of the aisle. As Andy McCarthy points out in a separate article, Obama is moving us towards a 9-10 law enforcement model for dealing with terrorism, putting the FBI back in the drivers seat. Read the article here. As McCarthy documents, that did not work out well when tried in the 1990's.

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