The Christmas Day bombing scare on Northwest Flight 253 was a failure of government intelligence, according to President Obama. And for once, I applaud my President for criticizing his staff – and publicly. And there’s no doubt he is a good manager – he made sure to make sure his senior leadership knew that he is supportive of all of them. But the President also faulted his staff for not working together to get the job done – to put the pieces of intelligence together so that they could find a terrorist before he was able to carry out his plan.
But the question for me is why wasn’t the guy tagged as a flight risk from the moment he bought his plane ticket with cash? Why wasn’t his name entered into the “no fly” list to cross-check for whether or not he should get on the plane? And the fact that the ticket agent (if there was one) didn’t make a note that he had no luggage and tag him for questioning before he boarded the plane? What’s up with that?
I suppose my questions are the same ones that President Obama is asking. And I’m glad he is. And he’s also demanding answers, and change. Because if those of us who watch action movies know better how the government should be doing its job than those in the government, isn’t it time for a change?
The Naked Emperor for me here is what everyone in Washington already knows. The government has a lot of bright intelligent people working for it, but because it is a massive organization, there are organizational battles and turf issues and management struggles. All of which get in the way of (and apparently prevent) effective intelligence analysis. And as a result, get in the way of protecting Americans from Al Qaeda. The first explosive example of this failure happened on 9/11. With apologies to my friend who is a senior official in the TSA, and tells me the system is working, I think it’s safe to say it’s not working good enough.
12/25/09 was just a reminder.
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