After four days of downplaying the severity of the thwarted Christmas Day terror attack, President Obama finally found a gap in his busy golf-and-snorkeling regimen in Hawaii to concede that a “catastrophic” national security failure occurred when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to explode a bomb on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 enroute from Amsterdam to Detroit. Despite his admission, however, there’s still no outward evidence that Obama or his most senior officials understand the severity of the failure.
For reasons not yet explained, the U.S. State Department issued a visa to Abdulmutallab despite knowing that he had terrorist connections and had been denied a British visa because of those connections. The Transportation Safety Administration was similarly unconcerned despite the fact that Abdulmutallab raised two red flags by paying for his ticket with cash and checking no luggage. And the CIA sat for weeks on a report that Abdulmutallab’s father had warned a CIA officer in an American embassy of the possible threat posed by his son. This was no casual concern as the father met twice in person with the officer and provided additional details in telephone and written communications.
Eventually the information about Abdulmutallab was passed from the CIA to the National Counterterrorism Center within the Directorate of National Intelligence. This suggests that the White House National Security Council may also have known about Abdulmutallab. Obviously, no one at the DNI or NSC did what should have been done to prevent Abdulmuttallab’s attack. Questions must also be answered about tensions between Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and CIA Director Leon E. Panetta.
The bottom line is this: Given the failure at every level to identify and address the threat posed by Abdulmutallab, why should the American people have reason to feel safe when boarding any commercial airliner now? Were it not for a faulty detonator, nearly 300 hundred passengers and crew members would have been killed. And yet, Obama still dodged blame, grumbling that “the system that has been in place for years now is not sufficiently up to date.” Someone needs to remind Obama there’s a reason why the phrase “the buck stops here” originated in the Oval Office.The American people have already waited too long for their chief executive to end his Hawaii vacation and give them a comprehensive reckoning about both what went wrong and what’s being done to protect them in the future. The clock is ticking, Mr. President. We sincerely hope it’s not attached to another bomb.
