01/10/10
from The Daily Beast
Stop Blaming the CIA
by Marc Thiessen
January 9, 2010 | 6:24pm
The president is wrong to scapegoat the intelligence agency for failing to
connect the dots on the Christmas bomber. Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen
on why Obama’s early moves tied our hands in the war on terror.
The report released by the White House Thursday into the failure to stop al
Qaeda’s attempt to blow up a passenger plane over Detroit found a number of
mistakes were made—including the misspelling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s name
and the failure to put him on the no-fly list. But the ultimate failure was much
larger. According to the New York Times, “The report concluded that the
government’s counterterrorism operations had been caught off guard by the
sophistication and strength of a Qaeda cell in Yemen, where officials say the
plot against the United States originated.”
President Obama laid blame for this failure on the agency he has put under siege
since his second day in office: the CIA. “This was not a failure to collect
intelligence,” he declared this week, “it was a failure to integrate and
understand the intelligence we had …. That’s not acceptable and I will not
tolerate it.” But the President’s chief counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan,
told a different story, acknowledging that we did not, in fact, have all the
intelligence we needed: “We did have the information throughout the course of
the summer and fall about … plans to carry out attacks,” Brennan said. “We had
snippets of information …. We may have had a partial name. We might have had an
indication of a Nigerian. But there was nothing that brought it all together.”
The ability to detain and question senior terrorist operatives is not a luxury
we can do without; it is essential to preventing new attacks on our country.
The question is: why did we have nothing that brought all the “snippets”
of information together? Because within 48 hours after taking office, President
Obama eliminated the only tool that would allow the intelligence community to do
so: the CIA program to interrogate senior terrorist leaders. Thanks to Obama,
America no longer have the capability to detain and question the only
individuals who know how the information fits together—the terrorists
themselves.
Read the whole article at The Daily Beast.
After you've finished reading this "current events" article, you might want to come back to this site and revisit Spring 2009 when I posted a page called the point_of_interrogation which has a lot of pages branching below it. They all pretty much predicted that sooner or later we'd be sorry that baraq obuma had hobbled our intelligence officers.