WARNING OF CERTAIN AND IMMINENT ATTACK…..COMPLACENCY IS NOT AN OPTION
Bare Warning
Homeland Security: When it comes to foul balls, a “heads up!” is no big deal. But when the government warns of imminent and “certain” attack by al-Qaida, complacency is not an option.
A chilling spectacle just took place before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Panel Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked, “What is the likelihood of another terrorist-attempted attack on the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months, high or low?”
And one by one, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta and FBI Director Robert Mueller all agreed an attack was “certain.”
But log onto the Department of Homeland Security’s Web site and all seems fairly calm. The first news item listed says, “Secretary Napolitano Announces More than $23 Million in Recovery Act Funding for Fire Station Construction Grants.” And three of the other four news items on the main page tout the ways the department’s $56.3 billion fiscal year 2011 budget request would be spent.
You have to look for the fine print and click a couple of times to find out the nation’s terror alert condition — yellow or “elevated,” like during most of the time since 9/11.
But if an attack is “certain” as the U.S. intelligence community tells us (but only after being asked by a senator), then shouldn’t there be a bit more urgency than this?
Far from scrambling to stave off sure and impending disaster, this administration is bragging that its ill-advised policies haven’t yet done harm.
We shouldn’t be releasing anyone in our custody who could end up returning to terrorist activities, but White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan was touting “significant improvements to the detainee review process” for Gitmo prisoners in a Monday letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Even if the recidivism rate is zero among the dozens of POWs that have been released, as Brennan reports, we saw on Christmas Day that it only takes one terrorist to kill hundreds. This is exactly what would have happened over the skies near Detroit had a little luck and a lot of guts from passengers not been on our side.
The administration boasts that Undiebomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is now “cooperating” — as if they didn’t blow the chance for a treasure trove of lifesaving information from him about al-Qaida’s structure and future plots by reading him his Miranda rights, getting him a lawyer, and allowing him to clam up less than an hour after being detained.
The president’s answer to legitimate unease about homeland security is to ask the concerned to “put aside the schoolyard taunts about who’s tough.”
Last April, the president visited CIA headquarters to boost morale. “Speaking before some of the very intelligence officers he had publicly accused of complicity in torture,” as Bush White House chief speechwriter Marc Thiessen writes in his new book defending the CIA’s enhanced interrogation, “Courting Disaster,” President Obama admitted to them that under his new policies, “you’ve got a harder job.”
“The president has, by his own admission, forced the CIA to operate with one hand tied behind its back” — Obama’s own analogy — and “made the agency’s job of protecting us from terror harder,” adds Thiessen.
At the risk of being accused of a schoolyard taunt, does the certainty of another attack have anything to do with one of America’s hands being tied?
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