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By Maj. Gen. Jerry R. Curry (ret'd)
CurryforAmerica.com
Over the past year President Obama’s amateurish dithering, his misuse of national intelligence resources, and his lack of leadership ability and experience has significantly weakened America’s national security at every level. All of the effort he’s spent trying to close Guantanamo would have been much better spent stabilizing the country of Yemen and limiting further al-Qaeda penetrations and operations there.
Instead of preventing terrorist attacks here in the USA Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general, has been at work 24/7 attempting to find prosecutorial grounds under which to punish intelligence operatives of former administrations. If you work in the FBI, CIA, or other intelligence agencies you had better duck for cover because Obama’s counter terrorism and intelligence officials are spending more time trying to catch your failures than tracking down Muslim terrorist sleeper cells operating within our nation’s borders.
By extending our citizens’ constitutional rights to terrorists, Obama has significantly curtailed the nation’s ability to extract vital intelligence information from senior al-Qaeda members and other terrorist leaders. He has stopped fruitful, aggressive interrogation programs and given away the secrets of our nation’s interrogation methods to our enemies.
Obama’s witch-hunting has alienated the Defense Department, CIA, FBI, and other intelligence communities and has made them skeptical of his motives. Today you would have to be a fool to risk your career and life in the service of your country trying to develop or follow up on desperately needed intelligence leads and information. You can be certain that if things turn out less than perfect, the President and his attorney general will be gleefully lurking around the corner ready to spring forth to entrap and prosecute you.
After the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) was set up as a clearinghouse for raw intelligence information. Obama blames the Center and the CIA for not preventing the Christmas Day underwear bomber from getting on the Northwest Airliner headed for Detroit, saying that he will not tolerate such “systemic failures”. What Obama fails to mention is that his administration had planned deep budget cuts for the NCTC prior to the underwear bomber’s flight. Perhaps now the NCTC budget will not only be restored, but increased.
The president fails to understand that these were not just run of the mill “systemic failures.” These were human errors -- failures in leadership – all up and down the chain of command. These failures have not been corrected because there is little accountability in the Obama administration. It treats intelligence failures as cavalierly as it treats job creation.
Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, issued a 7 January memo addressing the underwear bomber situation in which he spoke of the flight as Northwest Flight 153. It was actually flight 253. If you can’t even get three numbers correct, what can you get right? Apparently not much.
Our constitution forces us to place our national security in the hands of the President and his administration. Unfortunately, it appears that our confidence is sorely misplaced and we are sadly being deceived. It is a poignant indicator that the only thing that kept our nation from a disaster on Christmas Day was a handful of brave and alert passengers and an incompetent terrorist who couldn’t detonate his bomb.
Putting the wrong flight number in an intelligence memo is not just a minor oversight. It’s an indication that the Obama Administration’s benign intelligence apparatus and efforts cannot be taken seriously by either the American people or by Muslim terrorists. My experience with the intelligence community taught me that what some might call an insignificant mistake, could very well prove to be the difference between life and death. Due to a similar “insignificant mistake” – a simple typo – the underwear bomber was mistakenly granted a visa by our State Department and allowed to board the plane.
These so-called little mistakes are not only dangerous and life threatening, they are pathetic and disappointing. Everyone knows, especially the U.S. State Department, that an obvious “red flag” is a passenger who buys a one-way ticket, pays cash for it, and has no passport and baggage. The underwear bomber’s identification as a possible terrorist, and his neutralization, should have taken place long before he got in that line to buy a plane ticket.
Another case in point is the three gate crashers at the White House dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. These three weren’t on the White House social or the Secret Service’s guest lists, but because of another “insignificant mistake” they were able to walk past security and casually sidle up to the President, even have their pictures taken with him. If al-Qaeda knew how easy it was to get to stand next to the President, they could have probably taken him out at one of the Presidential Inaugural parties.
But no, that’s too hasty a conclusion. President
Bush was responsible for security
at the Obama inauguration parties. So the three gate crashers wouldn’t have been
able to get through without being on the guest list.