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It will likely take the establishment media a few more days, perhaps even a week, to realize the basic truth behind the “pants bomber” disaster, but, remember, you heard it here, at the TerryReport first: this failure was in many ways worse than the failure to uncover and react to the 9-11 plot as it developed. When you add on top of this the latest news (12.29.09) that indicates that American intelligence agencies were aware of the would be bomber and some of his plans, as well as indications that a plot was developing, then the failure takes on near epic proportions.
First, lets deal with the lower level, simple assumption that this looks worse than 9-11, even before factoring in the idea that the intelligence agencies knew a plot was coming. Just about every red flag you could imagine was raised by this guy:
1st RED FLAG: The warning from his father that he had become radicalized and that they did not know of his whereabouts. Mind you, this is coming from a highly prominent citizen of Nigeria, not some back alley hipster trying to sell information.
2nd RED FLAG: He paid for his ticket in cash.
3rd RED FLAG: He bought a one way ticket (hey, he knew he wasn’t coming back in any case, right?)
4th RED FLAG: He had a multiple entry visa into the US which allowed him to come and go as he wished. Anyone who has such a visa and comes up on the radar as a potential risk should not waltz into an airport and onto a commercial airliner.
5th RED FLAG: Of lesser, but still vital, importance is the fact that he wrote about his problems and his drift toward radicalism on the Internet. If the intelligence agencies had wind of him, did they check his writings? It took the news media only a short while to turn up these meandering warnings that something was building inside his brain. If people give you public, easy to understand signals that they are leaning toward radicalism, you’ve got to follow-up. If those writings were connected in anyway to his father’s warning, then flashing lights would have gone off like a fire alarm in the night.
How can it be worse if no one died and 3,000 people died in 2001? Because, this time, we were on notice and had taken measures around the world to try to protect the US from attack. We had those markers, above, like paying in cash. Before 9-11, we had intelligence, some vague, some direct combined with suspicion that something was coming. It was like knowing “some day I might get cancer”: that doesn’t mean you go to your doctor every day for a checkup, does it? This time was far different. This time we already had one bout with the cancer of terrorism and we knew that copycats around the world were aching to follow in bin Laden’s ugly footsteps.
PLUS, we’ve spent $40,000,000,000. (that’s forty billion dollars, for those slow with big numbers) on “homeland security”, PLUS we gone into two wars, captured terrorists worldwide and shifted the entire focus of agencies like the FBI, CIA and NSA away from whatever goofy things they were doing pre-9-11 and put the focus on terrorism.
As the old, somewhat dumb saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” We’ll we’ve been fooled twice (and more) big time and we haven ‘t yet learned our lesson, which is the effort against terrorism has to be coordinated and carefully led and, just maybe, it can’t be accomplished by a government bureaucracy where everyone is looking out for themselves and keeping their jobs, often to the determent of the mission.
It is the job of the Obama gang to get a handle on this and provide leadership, real, hard, tough and unblinking leadership that will connect all the dots on terrorism, once and for all. It is not working now. The missed attack of Christmas, 2009 could just as easily have been a coordinated effort to bring down five or ten airliners at once or something even worse.
As for whether “the system worked”, that’s a useless debate. We don’t have a system. There is no system. It is just a bunch of apparently uncoordinated efforts by various agencies to do the right thing. The idea of organizing a massive “Homeland Security Department” might have been the worst idea of all, because it involved, once passed by Congress, years of trying to get all the elephants to dance together. Maybe instead of dancing elephants, we need something far smaller, far more raw to cut through the crap and pull all the information together and bring about swift action. Yes, mistakes can be made in that sort of effort, but it is not likely that they would involve being asleep at the wheel.
Doug Terry, 12.29.09
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