America will never, ever, have an honest debate about the costs associated with security as long as Joe Lieberman chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee. To which I say, heckuva job Barack.

I will second that!

And a Happy New Year Teddy!!

Well obviously he should be impeached. How much longer must we tolerate this usurper?

You cant say this often enough for me:

this isn’t like George W. Bush’s August 6, 2001 PDB, which discussed a staggering 70 FBI investigations into al-Qaeda; articulated al-Qaeda’s desire to use planes as missiles; and placed a forthcoming homeland attack within the context of escalating al-Qaeda threats.

I also refer you to the scott horton harper’s interview with Michael Sheehan, about how we should not give PR victories to a very much weakened Al Q, focus on the real threat instead of disrupting our society, target precisely, avoid hysteria–cheney are you listening?

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/06/hbc-90003079

now watch this drive.

or as Ron Suskind reported:
you covered your ass….

Tenet and his loyalists also settle a few scores with the White House here. The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department’s counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan’s army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton’s message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were “definitely not” up to the job, and “we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/19/AR2006061901211.html

I agree, except to point out that Lieberman is not the only impediment to having an honest discussion about security costs. W poisoned the well by using scare tactics after 9/11 to unify the country around him. The lasting legacy of that is most people think any cost is OK wrt security, or at least they don’t object to monetary or nonmonetary costs. Shit, WJ has had several call-ins about new airline procedures and before my thumb could even reach the channel change button, several callers had already announced that they were willing to ride planes naked & without baggage if it would only save their lives. And no one even came close to dying in the latest incident.

And no one even came close to dying in the latest incident.

really?

It never hurts to report and repeat all the Bushian era truth; lest we forget and he gets lionized for keeping us safe..ha, ha, ha. Repeat repeat repeat. He’s the one who seeks to cover his ass, as it appears.

This needs to be the cost the GOP pays for hopelessly policizing the Obama Administration’s response to the Underpants Bomber: constant references to the PDB Bush ignored less than a month before 9/11.

“Investigators now say AbdulMutallab was allegedly carrying PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate — enough of it to blow a hole in the aircraft.

But the device he used failed to detonate fully, instead setting off the fire, authorities said.”

pretty fucking close if you were on that plane

But the part about the people willing to fly naked is accurate.

It’s so hard to read you!

I thought the hyperbole was obvious, but maybe not. Tone of voice is hard to do in typing.

I just assumed you were kiddin!

White House Adviser Briefed in October on Underwear Bomb Technique

White House Adviser Briefed in October on Underwear Bomb Technique

So is the pun intended or not?

you’ve covered your ass…

I am reasonably certain.

The problem I have with this preoccupation with terrorists is that it gives them way too much power over us, it’s like using an ICBM to kill a pestering housefly. Something like 20,000 people die every year from slipping and falling in their shower, how about a $3 trillion response to that problem? For that kind of money we could put a grab bar in every shower on earth I would think, and it would save a lot more lives than the $3 trillion we invested in trying to kill bin Laden…

Has the WH been briefed about the 120 Americans who die each day because of health care Terrorism?

Let’s not let ourselves lose perspective.

The government has spend 11 month debating the costs and measures to apply to saving 45,000 souls per year.

They’re concluding that it’s ok if only 20,000 continue dying?

Moral equivalency issues, anyone?

The way to do that is to significantly lower the standards for keeping people out of the U.S., and that has significant consequences for all manner of other interests.

If Abdulmutallab were put on a list requiring extra inspection scrutiny, he would have been caught. Putting in place the policy “if someone with credibility in country X claims a close family member is in contact with people in country Y to commit an act of terrorism, and country Y is a suspected terror hotspot, we will search him extra hard” may not be “cost-free”, but it’s about as close as any government policy could ever be.

This debate is really frustrating me–it is true that there are a lot of people on the no-fly list who shouldn’t be on it (people with same name as terrorist Z who can prove they are in fact not terrorist Z), it’s true that we are engaged in some bone-dead stupid wastes of money in order to prevent terrorism (Afghanistan), and it’s true that the media and the right are inflating the underwear bomber way out of proportion (to the benefit of al Qaeda), but it is ALSO true that the government screwed up here.

Teddy, your favoritest ombudsman has died…!

The truth is plain as day: A great portion of the population is against taxes. Mention a tax or a fee, and the tea baggers and republicans and moderate democrats have a self induced nervous breakdown.

Yet, they want a perfect military, a perfect homeland security, a perfectly unregulated banking system, and they want it now, unless it costs a penny out of their pocket. They are one of America’s impediments to national financial and personal security.

The proposition that the USA will spend the money, and take the necessary time, to provide the security to necessary to provide the kind of blanket 100% protection on airliners, trains, cruises, malls, military bases, schools, museums, churches, or other places where large crowds gather, is just a silly proposition. A’int going to happen.

Each one of these attempted or successful attacks, as few as they may be
when taken in context, is all the enemy needs to put this country in a state of utter fear and paralysis of one degree or another, assured by the hysteria of the right wing and the security/military industrial complex. In that regard, the enemy has won that battle on that day. The rest of the battle’s greatest damage is USA self-inflicted.

There is no way to find each needle in the hay stack of an armed enemy coming aboard a plane or entering crowded venues (e.g., Major Hassan at Fort Hood)) who seek to kill and sometimes do kill. Not even fascist, communist, nazi, socialist, military, religious theocracies, have been able to achieve such a state of affairs, let alone an open democracy like ours.

Until Americans are taught and understand the truth: that we are at war HERE AND THERE, that we cannot stop every attack, and that the damage that terror inflicts will be entirely greater than the attack itself, if we allow it to paralyze us with fear each time an attack is made, we shall continue to suffer the consequences.

Bush and Cheney mismanaged the 8 year armed conflict with these affiliated and unaffiliated groups that seek to kill, injure, damage and destroy both Western countries and those countries at peace with the former.

Expecting this administration, given it having embracing some of the Bush/Cheney doctrines, but departing from others, to do any better in one year is pure folly.

Americans must first look themselves for an understanding of where we are, how we got here, and what’s best to exit this state of affairs. Looking to the likes of Sens. Graham, Lieberman, McCaine, Reps. King and Hoektsra, and Glenn Beck, etc., will only send you under your bed in fear, where there are no answers.

Reality is the first stop.

Actually, I disagree. Since we have been flying Predators for reconnaissance and targetting Osama Bid Ladin in Afghanistan since 2000 before 9/11, we have every right to turn to our government and shout,”Why are you incapable of protecting us from those whom you clearly know want to destroy us?” And we have every right to turn on whomever is in power and say, “You do not have my permission to escalate conflicts you started with the CIA without my permission.” Predator drone that **********!

http://open.salon.com/blog/bruce_dixon/2009/12/31/is_the_nigerian_terrorist_apprehended_in_detroit_a_patsy

This video at RTV, Russian TV asks the question media in the US will not. Is the guy a patsy?

He is supposed to be an engineering student AND a “trained” terrorist. What kind of engineer doesn’t know the difference between a device that might take down a plane and one that would just set his lap on fire?

He paid cash for his ticket in Ghana and had no checked baggage. All over the world they pull people into rooms to question and search them all the time for stuff like this. But not this guy.

He had a multiple entry US visa but showed neither it or his passport to get on the last leg to the US. Anybody who’s been to Europe knows they have multiple layers of screening, much tougher than in the US. How did he get on there with no passport, no visa and no checked bags?

Is he another incompetent mope manipulated to cause a “terror” incident so the authorities can

(1) whip up fear, the same way they used to with color-coded alerts
(2) claim “the system worked” and lobby for more restrictions on civil liberties, more surveillance of civilians, more militarization of life in the US
(3) justify US intervention in West Africa, from where almost 20% of US oil imports flow
(4) justify US intervention in Yemen, where the drones and cruise missiles are already bombing and our mercs and special forces are already kidnapping and murdering…

Let’s not loose sight of the big picture.

The people that set the course of American foreign policy, those that Chomsky calls the “central planners” in the State Department for example, operate on the notion that the US is by definition always benign in their intentions as they go around the world intervening in one country after another.

In this way even if we fall short of our goals the effort was worth it since we meant well and were concerned only to improve people’s lives or their safety or their freedom or some other benign aim. And this belief is shared not only by the likes of a Lieberman but basically by all those who shape and plan US foreign poilicy and defend it in the media and think tanks.

The campaign against terrorism is couched in the same termes. Thus our aim is to rid the world of real evil, but by definition evil is only what other people do. Our actions can never be seen as evil and as long as this one way standard is adhered to there is no hopw of changing course.

There’s simply no report in the Hosenball report. See Sullivan relating Mike Allen’s(!) take on it. Or just read the excerpt given here. The information in the ‘graf’ could be equally be rewritten as such: “I can confirm that there was no specific warning about a threat from Yemen, and beyond that I can provide absolutely no information about what was in the holiday threat assessment.”

Damn, if I wanted to read mainstream Democrat Party consensus national security pablum, I’d read the NYT.

Any of this plather originating from the federal national security apparatus that is leaked to the public is done so for a reason and must be treated as deceptive.

Ward Churchill puts this forth how we need to be analyzing this in a progressive context:

http://www.coloradoaim.org/Wardchurchillghostsof911.htm

In the Alternative

In 1945, addressing a strikingly similar context of national criminality and denial–albeit one in which the state and its collaborating corporate institutions had been pounded into physical submission by external forces–the philosopher Karl Jaspers set forth a schematic of culpability, acceptance of which he suggested might allow both Germans and Germany to redeem themselves.135 Internalizing Jaspers four-part formulation stands to yield comparable results in America, for Americans, and thus for everyone else as well. It is therefore well worth summarizing here (in a somewhat revised form reflecting enunciation of the Nuremberg Doctrine and other subsequent developments).136

First, there is the matter of criminal guilt. States, corporations and other such entities, while they may be criminally-conceived, and employed for criminal purposes, do not themselves commit crimes. Crimes–that is, violations of customary or black letter law–are committed by individuals, those who conceive, employ or serve state and corporate institutions. Those alleged to have committed specific offenses are subject to personal prosecution and punishment.137 If the transgressions of which they stand accused are of a sort sanctioned either explicitly or implicitly by the state under which authority they’ve acted, their prosecution cannot as a rule occur before tribunals controlled by that same state.138 Nor, if mere vengeance is to be avoided, can such tribunals be placed as a rule under control of the immediate victims. Where crimes of state and/or state-sanctioned crime are at issue, the only appropriate judicial forum is an impartially-composed international court.139

It is never criminal to resist war crimes or crimes against humanity, and when necessary to stop war crimes, other crimes of lesser magnitude may find criminal defense if commited to stop war crimes. To repeat Churchill:

Therein, incontestably, lies the guilt shared by all who opt to remain alive while Others are systematically subjugated, dispossessed, tortured and murdered.

[Mod Note: In order to stay within Fair Use guidelines, limit extracts from articles at other sites to a couple of hundred words with a link to the original]

On the one hand, it appears that anonymous intel folks are more willing to drop a dime on President Obama than they were with Bush, leaking classified tidbits to the media. OTOH, assuming good faith on the part of the leakers, this might have salutary results in an administration already willing to take responsibility for its own screwups.

I disagree. Plastic explosives are inherently stable compounds (think dynamite as opposed to nitroglycerine, except more so). Lighting them on fire does nothing except cause them to burn. One caveat, if you can figure out a way to burn them in a compressed container they will detonate, or perhaps light them on fire and then hit the burning compound with a hammer or stomp it out, but I wouldn’t count on that. Plastic requires a chain reaction explosion to get going and that requires a detonator that burns with a high enough temperature and a short enough duration. Detonators are fairly simple–think firecracker–consisting of a small amount of explosive in a compressed container with a means of ignition–either fuse or electrical. But, a detonator LOOKS like a detonator and is not easy to get through screening, which is probably why these Mickey Mouse attempts are being made. My fear is that these guys are going to figure out how to smuggle the detonators on board–they’ve proven they can get the plastique through screening, but detonators are metal or have metal components and that is harder.

Right on. Except after reading FDL these past weeks, I’ve been sold. SO I say impeach Obama AND Emanuel. Obviously they want to destroy America and hand it over to AIG so that their middle-of-the-road pragmatism can enslave us all to years of compromises and broken promises.

I get so tired of reading where (my) republicans use the excuse that the other side did it or your side defending Obama because Bush did it. If either one did it and it was wrong or a mistake, then the current powers to be should learn from our past sins.

If Bush did release two Gitmos detainees to Yemen, then, clearly, that was a mistake, IMO. Not reason for Obama to continue the practice and the right claim it to be okay because Bush did it. Jesh, for all this ‘Bush did it’ crap, you might as well left Bush in place.

But there is an inherent difference between the Bush anti-terroism policy and the one Obama claims to be that of Bush every time as an excuse. As now being released by ‘unnamed’ sources inside the state department, the current intelligence community is not permitted to profile – huge difference. So that makes it a bit difficult to catch these characters when you know the man-killers are sharks and you’re out looking for grizzly bears.

If the head of Saudi anti-terrorism makes a special visit to the WH in October to warn us that panty bombers are on their way from Yemen, and we suffer a (foiled) attack by one of these, then Obama has no one to blame but himself.

Inside 12 months, are there many remaining for him to throw under the bus?

“this isn’t like George W. Bush’s August 6, 2001 PDB, which discussed a staggering 70 FBI investigations into al-Qaeda; articulated al-Qaeda’s desire to use planes as missiles; and placed a forthcoming homeland attack within the context of escalating al-Qaeda threats.”

Apparently you haven’t ever taken the 30 seconds to actually READ the 8/6 PDB. As nowhere does it article a desire to use planes as missiles. I’d suggest you follo=we the link and read the actual source before inaccurately quoting it.

If (and I know it is alot to ask) you spend the time to read it, you’d probably coming away thinking it was the vaguest piece of intelligence you had ever seen, although I’d doubt you’d actually say that as it would interfere with your narrative about Bush ignoring it. Truth be told, that PDB is FAR less descriptive about timing and tactics than what was shared on the underwear bomber.

Not “they”, just a couple of the bastards.

No thanks.

That doesn’t really work well.