Posts Tagged ‘terrorism’

Let’s say your boss is on vacation and something big happens at the office. You don’t want to bother him, so you tell everyone that there is nothing to worry about, “the system worked. Then, a couple days later your boss is compelled to hold a press conference to admit that there was a “systemic failure.” Quite the opposite of “the system worked.” You’d probably then be a little worried about whether you were going to keep your job.

So DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano is probably not feeling all that secure right now. Obama hasn’t thrown her under the bus yet. But using “systemic failure” must make Napolitano cringe. As she was doing serious damage control about how her comments were related to the aftermath of the attack, Obama did, kind of, come to her defense:

Mr. Obama appeared to be trying to contain the damage on Tuesday, offering “systemic failure” as a substitute diagnosis for “system worked.” He framed Ms. Napolitano’s statement by saying she was right that “once the suspect attempted to take down Flight 253, after his attempt, it’s clear that passengers and crew, our homeland security systems and our aviation security took all appropriate actions.”

Remember what happened after the last president defended a top official in a crisis? “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie.”

I’m not certain Napolitano should feel much comfort in the comments from Obama. Brown resigned within days of being praised by President Bush.

Air travel. We Americans do a lot of it. More than most countries, by a long shot. I do quite a bit myself – by Dec. 31 I will have logged nearly 200,000 miles this year alone.

What disturbs me about the botched attack by a young Nigerian radical on a Northwest flight from Amsterdam to Detroit is that it could have easily been thwarted.

A 23 year-old man buys a one-way ticket with cash and has no luggage on an overseas flight. Are you kidding me? I buy a one-way ticket on my credit card on any flight other than US Airways (the carrier I use the most) and I am almost always selected for secondary security screening.

The New York Times reports that Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano initially said “the system worked.” Of course that is absurd, and she quickly had to backtrack on that statement, trying to brush it aside as being taken “out of context.”

From the New York Times article:

Ms. Napolitano was not the only Obama administration official to initially portray the episode, in which passengers and flight attendants subdued Mr. Abdulmutallab and doused the fire he had started, as a test that the air safety system passed.

Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, echoed the positive comments Ms. Napolitano made on ABC’s “This Week, ” saying in an interview on “Face the Nation” on CBS that “in many ways, this system has worked.”

But counterterrorism experts and members of Congress were hardly willing to praise what they said was a security system that had proved to be not nimble enough to respond to the ever-creative techniques devised by would-be terrorists.

Congressional leaders said the tip from Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, should have resulted in closer scrutiny of the suspect before he boarded the plane in Amsterdam. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking minority member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said his visa should have been revoked or at least he should have been given a physical pat-down or a full-body scan.

“This individual should not have been missed,” Ms. Collins said in an interview on Sunday. “Clearly, there should have been a red flag next to his name.”

I have blogged a number of times (here, here and here) about Napolitano not being ready for prime time as DHS Secretary. She has proven it once again.

The Obama administration has decided that it doesn’t like the phrase “global war on terror” and has instructed its folks to refer to it as the “long war” or “overseas contingency operation.”

The Obama administration appears to be backing away from the phrase “global war on terror,” a signature rhetorical legacy of its predecessor.

In a memo e-mailed this week to Pentagon staff members, the Defense Department’s office of security review noted that “this administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ [GWOT.] Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.’ ”

This is dangerous.  Words have meaning, and by refusing to call the global war on terror what it is, we put our nation and our citizens (especially those overseas) at risk.  As I had commented a couple weeks ago when Secretary Napolitano didn’t use the words “terror” or “terrorism” in her first appearance on Capitol Hill, this refusal to address the real threat we face will come at a price, and that price may be pretty high.

Now is not the time to back down on this effort.  Too much is at stake.