national security team

Obama’s Speech: “Buck stops with me”

I am finally happy with President Obama again.

He gave an incredible and powerful speech yesterday afternoon (1/7/10) on his assessment of the attempted Christmas 2009 airline bombing in Detroit, MI, after having read the two final reviews he requested Thursday from his national security team.

The Presidential Directives he issued to address the gaps that allowed this 23 year-old Nigeiran, Umar Abdulmatullab, to get on the Northwest aircraft with explosives were impressive as well.

The PD’s address airport security and screening, but more importantly, they address the systematic and human failures that occurred that prevented them from connecting and assessing the intelligence we already had that could have kept Umar from boarding the plane altogether (his name should have been on the no-fly list, etc.).

He also made it very clear that as long as he is President, the Al Qaeda terrorists will not be given any victory, big or small.

I believe this event was a wake up call.

I believe the folks in our government agencies will be humbled by this event and realize even with what they had been doing, the terrorists outsmarted us again.

Perhaps now they are at the point where they just won’t tolerate that (humiliation) anymore. They might even step up a bit and act as they did right after 9/11  - not slack one bit, make smarter decisions, and do things outside of what their job requires sometimes for the sake of our national security.

Ex: When a father comes in to an Embassy and turns on his son, reporting him to authorities, that the official listening does more than just enter the person’s name into the TIDE system. (This is his own father, not just a jealous friend). They pick up a phone and call everyone and anyone they can think of until someone answers and takes immediate action to find that extremist person. If at the least, all his Visas/Passports should have been immediately checked to make sure they were valid and current and with what countries. It would have been discovered his U.S. was overdue.

I think this also made the global population more viligiant again (like after 9/11) to pick up on spotty behavior and alert authorities – just as what happened at Newark, NJ airport last Wednesday, when someone reported a person not going through security and the airport shutting Terminal C down.

And for all this,  I do think we have less a chance of an attack happening on our US soil than we did before Christmas 2009.

Obama seemed a lot stronger yesterday than I have seen him in a while. Lately, he had had been buckling to the idiosyncrosies of the Republican and opposition people on many issues.

Perhaps this was a wake up call for him as well – to get back to being the strong leader he was when he first stepped into the Presidency, this month last year.