Two Strikes: CBS Report Says Dots Not Connected in Ft. Hood/Hasan Case, Either; "It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case"

Hmmm... Seems like we have a pattern here.

Video report here.

Print report:

Less than a month after major Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon's top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots. It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case, reports CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin.

According to that still-classified report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw all 18 e-mails he exchanged with that radical Yemeni cleric Awlaki whose communications were being monitored under a court ordered wiretap.

After the Washington task force decided Hasan was not dangerous, it never asked to see his subsequent communications with Alwaki.

In both cases, a complete lack of seriousness about terror.

That's two strikes.

And I'm not saying that's two strikes. Obama's top aide on military and foreign policy said that.

"White House national security adviser James Jones says Americans will feel 'a certain shock' when they read an account being released Thursday of the missed clues that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day bomber from ever boarding the plane," USA Today writes. "'That's two strikes,' Obama's top White House aide on defense and foreign policy issues said, referring to the foiled bombing of the Detroit-bound airliner and the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in November. In that case, too, officials failed to act when red flags were raised about an Army psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Hasan. He has been charged with killing 13 people. Jones said Obama 'certainly doesn't want that third strike, and neither does anybody else.'"

Obama blames this on Bush -- a systemic failure, he says, and of course he wants you to know the system exists as it did under Bush.

Well, right. But see, Obama was complaining we'd "taken our eye off the ball" on Al Qaeda and all of that in his year-long brief against Bush. And his promise was to put his eye back on the ball.

Instead, he's dicked around with stimulus that doesn't stimulate and health care reform that doesn't reform.

He's had a year now to get the "systemic failure" out of the system and get the system to where it needs to be.

Better get your head out of your ass, Mate. Your aide is right -- a third strike won't just kill a hundred Americans. It will kill your chances of reelection.

The public doesn't seem to mind the blame-shifting in other areas -- the economy, for example. They take that as politics as usual, and tend to agree that Bush really screwed the pooch here too.

But on this? No. No blame-shifting. This is Job One, and either you get it through your skull that you are responsible and no excuses will be acceptable, or you're all done, fella.

The public is right to be scared out of its mind by a President who makes excuses about protecting them. A man armed with a ready excuse is a man armed with the best reason there is to fail.

They don't like that. They understand that that if you think you pass the buck, you won't take ownership of the problem.

Obama says the bucks stops with him. I think that's just focus-grouped rhetoric, but for the sake of the country, he'd better internalize that and believe it.

Thanks to AHFF Geoff.

posted by Ace at 08:27 PM

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