Obama is "Clueless" on Nat'l Security - Secy John Lehman

Lehman: Clueless Obama [Robert Costa]

After watching President Obama’s remarks on national security this afternoon, John Lehman, the secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, tells National Review Online that, “frankly, I’m pissed off.”

“President Obama just doesn’t get it,” says Lehman. “I don’t think he has a clue. It’s all pure spin. He’s ignoring key issues and taking respectable professionals like John Brennan and turning them into hacks and shills. It’s beyond contempt.”

“The president has ignored the 9/11 Commission’s report,” says Lehman. “This whole idea that we can fix things by jumping higher and faster is ridiculous. The fact is that the system worked just like we said it would work if the president failed to give the Director of National Intelligence the tools he needs: it’s bloated, bureaucratic, layered, and stultified.”

“President Obama continues to totally ignore one of the important thrusts of our 9/11 recommendations, which is that you have to approach counterterrorism as a multiagency intelligence issue, and not as a law-enforcement issue. He’s made a lot of commission’s members angry for dismissing our report and ignoring key recommendations.” Obama, he adds, has taken a “lawyer-like, politically-correct approach” to national security issues like terrorist watchlists and no-fly lists. “You got to blame the president for enforcing the politically-correct and legalistic policies that led to these failures.”


The Christmas Attack Report summary here.


The Message Filters Down [Victor Davis Hanson]

The repeated signs of radical Islamic furor that were shown by Major Hasan and ignored by his colleagues vested with authority, the assassination of CIA agents in Afghanistan by a double-agent Islamic operative, and the numerous missed opportunities to stop the Christmas Day airline terrorist, all should make us concerned about the effectiveness of various branches of our anti-terrorism services.

None of these deadly lapses are the direct fault of the present administration, but they are ominous signals that it is past time to once again think about counterterrorism as a necessary war against murderous Islamists rather than a criminal-justice matter that can be defused through serial outreach to the Islamic world, renunciation of effective Bush policies, and the personal charm and unique heritage of the president.

As worrisome as the actual acts themselves have been the immediate and baffling responses to them — in the Hasan case, military worries that Hasan's murdering might imperil efforts at diversity enhancement and was proof of a new sort of secondary post-traumatic stress syndrome; in the Abdulmutallab matter, initial assurances that the system "worked" and legalisms what he had "allegedly" attempted to do (blow up 300 people). As for the CIA matter, last year we shifted our attention to the supposed culpability of past CIA acts and the need to investigate our own agents, failing to appreciate how perilous a job they carry out in the most godforsaken places in the world.

Again, the climate at the top is essential in keeping us safe. If the commander in chief, through speeches and acts, treats the war on terror in terms of its superfluousness, its constitutional criminality, or past American culpability, rather than in terms of its essential role in keeping us all alive, then that message, in insidious ways, will filter down to various branches of the national-security community, whose members will begin to shift their attitudes and actions accordingly.Very dangerous, all this.


Instant Review [Cliff May]

Watching the White House briefing and my reaction: This is much too bureaucratic to be reassuring.

Also, what I think most Americans already grasp:

1) The father says his son may have joined al-Qaeda. One phone call should have been enough to cancel the kid's visa to the U.S. Why didn't that happen? I didn't hear an answer.

2) Abdulmutallab buys his one-way ticket with cash, has no luggage, and has been in Yemen for the past few months. So you pull him out of line, question him and screen him. Why didn't that happen? I didn't hear an answer.

And:

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

So where's the shock? What was new? What did I miss?


Bolton: Obama Misses the Big Picture [Robert Costa]

John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, tells National Review Online that President Obama’s remarks on recent American intelligence and security failures this afternoon “miss the big picture” and “ignore the problems we face in dealing with al-Qaeda.”

“I didn’t hear any hint of the president planning to deal with al-Qaeda’s growing capabilities,” says Bolton. “Now, maybe that’s still to come, but, for now, it seems like the president still thinks this is about one person and the intelligence agencies. He outlined a message of government management when he should have addressed the importance of destroying al-Qaeda’s base camps and eradicating its networks.”

Obama, Bolton adds, “needs to remember that classic formulation: the best defense is a good offense.”

“If we’re simply relying on the intelligence agencies to keep people off a plane, then we’ll have many more examples of near misses or, God forbid, a tragedy, in coming years,” says Bolton. “Pushing for a shift in the intelligence bureaucracy won’t stop al-Qaeda. I don’t think the president realizes the implications of what he’s doing with this kind of law-enforcement response.”

“The tone of the remarks is not what’s important,” says Bolton. “We’re not judging some rhetoric exercise. The metric of government is effective action and what he’s proposing addresses issues at the molecular level, not the molar level.”