The Obama Passport Caper Revisited

If you happened to be channel surfing on the night that the news broke that someone illegally accessed then-candidate Obama's passport file, you might have noticed that MSNBC was covering the story like it was a combination of Watergate, IranContra, and the death of Elvis. CNN, to its credit, had a more measured coverage. As soon as it came out that the perpetrator had also snooped into Hillary Clinton's and John McCain's file, the story quickly disappeared from all media outlets, including MSNBC. Newsmax is now claiming an Obama supporter (rather than what was presumed to be an opponent) breached the passport records:

Obama’s top terrorism and intelligence adviser, John O. Brennan, heads a firm that was cited in March for breaching sensitive files in the State Department’s passport office, according to a State Department Inspector General’s report released this past Jul

The security breach, first reported by the Washington Times and later confirmed by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, involved a contract employee of Brennan’s firm, The Analysis Corp., which has earned millions of dollars providing intelligence-related consulting services to federal agencies and private companies.

During a State Department briefing on March 21, 2008, McCormack confirmed that the contractor had accessed the passport files of presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and John McCain, and that the inspector general had launched an investigation.

Sources who tracked the investigation tell Newsmax that the main target of the breach was the Obama passport file, and that the contractor accessed the file in order to “cauterize” the records of potentially embarrassing information.

“They looked at the McCain and Clinton files as well to create confusion,” one knowledgeable source told Newsmax. “But this was basically an attempt to cauterize the Obama file.”

What could possibly be in a candidate's passport file that would be so damaging that an covert operative would need to go in and scrub it? Incidentally, a key witness in this incident was murdered, and the case remains unsolved.

TSA Nominee Used Database to Snoop On Wife's Boyfriend

Another day, another Obama administration nominee in trouble:

The White House nominee to lead the Transportation Security Administration gave Congress misleading information about incidents in which he inappropriately accessed a federal database, possibly in violation of privacy laws, documents obtained by The Washington Post show...

[Erroll] Southers, a former FBI agent, has described inconsistencies in his accounts to Congress as "inadvertent" and the result of poor memory of an incident that dates back 20 years. He said in a Nov. 20 letter to key senators obtained by The Post that he had accepted full responsibility long ago for a "grave error in judgment" in accessing confidential criminal records about his then-estranged wife's new boyfriend...

Civil liberties specialists said that the misuse of databases has been common among law enforcement authorities for many years, despite an array of local, state and federal prohibitions intended to protect personal information. Studies have found that police at every level examine records of celebrities, women they have met and political rivals. Some federal authorities have been jailed for selling records to criminals.

Southers also refuses to say whether he favors allowing TSA screeners to unionize. Given the hassles at airport security checkpoints as it is, can you imagine piling crazy union workrules on top of that?

Speaking of security at airports, open borders advocate Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary, announced a new international airport security initiative:

Senior Homeland Security officials will meet with leaders at major airports in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and the Middle East in the coming weeks "to review security procedures and technology being used to screen passengers on flights bound for the United States," the department announced this afternoon. Napolitano said she would follow up on those meetings with her own "ministerial level" discussions.

Intelligence Reviewer Has Major Conflict of Interest

Remember all that cockamamie campaign rhetoric about banning all those horrible lobbyists from the administration? According to Politico, never mind about all that:

President Barack Obama promised a “thorough review” of the government’s terrorist watch list system after a Nigerian man reported to U.S. government officials by his father to have radicalized and gone missing last month was allowed to board a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit that he later allegedly tried to blow up without any additional security screening.

Yet the individual Obama has chosen to lead the review, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, served for 35 years in the CIA, helped design the current watch list system and served as interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center, whose role is under review.

In the three years before joining the Obama administration, Brennan was president and CEO of The Analysis Corp., an intelligence contracting firm that worked closely with the National Counterterrorism Center and other U.S. government intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies on developing terrorism watch lists.

In the meantime, Newsweek claims that Obama received pre-Christmas intel about terror threats to the homeland:

President Barack Obama received a high-level briefing only three days before Christmas about possible holiday-period terrorist threats against the US, Newsweek has learned. The briefing was centered on a written report, produced by US intelligence agencies, entitled "Key Homeland Threats", a senior US official said.

The senior Administration official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that nowhere in this document was there any mention of Yemen, whose Al-Qaeda affiliate is now believed to have been behind the unsuccessful Christmas Day attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a transatlantic airliner with a bomb hidden in his underpants. However, the official declined to disclose any other information about the substance of the briefing, including what kind of specific warnings, if any, the President was given about possibly holiday attacks and whether Yemen came up during oral discussions.

By the way, as we've mentioned previously, the media used to go nuts about Bush's Crawford, Texas, vacations, but have they said word one about Obama's extended Hawaiian holiday in the midst of a terror attack?

In a related development, Obama reached back into the Bush administration to appoint Howard Schmidt as White House cybersecurity "czar." Schmidt, a former special cybersecurity advisor to President George W. Bush, specialized in computer security and forensics as an investigator for the FBI, the Air Force, and local law enforcement. In the private sector, he held executive positions related to cyber-security at Microsoft and eBay.

Who Is In Charge Of The Failed System?

If Bush had waited three days to publicly speak about the Northwest Airlines terrorist attack, the media would have demanded his head on a platter. In any event, the London Telegraph gives 10 reasons why the Obama administration gets an F in homeland security:

There is no more solemn duty for an American commander-in-chief than the martialling of “all elements of American power” – the phrase Obama himself used on Monday – to protect the people of the United States. In that key respect, Obama failed on Christmas Day, just as President George W. Bush failed on September 11th (though he succeeded in the seven years after that).

Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a “B+” for his 2008 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn into his underpants. He said today that a “systemic failure has occurred”. Well, he’s in charge of that system.

...In his studied desire to be the unBush by responding coolly to events like this, Obama is dangerously close to failing as a leader. Yes, it is good not to shoot from the hip and make broad assertions without the facts. But Obama took three days before speaking to the American people, emerging on Monday in between golf and tennis games in Hawaii to deliver a rather tepid address that significantly underplayed what happened. He described Abdulmutallab as an “isolated extremist” who “allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body” – phrases that indicate a legalistic, downplaying approach that alarms rather than reassures. Today’s words showed a lot more fire and desire to get on top of things – we’ll see whether Obama follows through with action. In the meantime, he went snorkelling.

On this side of the Atlantic, Col. Ralph Peters (ret.) warns that we are dealing with the international equivalent of "Bill Ayers and the Weathermen, pampered kids unhappy with the world."

Despite limited Special Operations strikes beyond our recognized combat zones, we still don't accept the nature of the threat from jet-set jihadis. Our leaders and our military are obsessed with holding ground in Afghanistan -- even though al Qaeda's growth areas are in Yemen and Africa.

We voluntarily tie ourselves down, while our enemies focus on mobility. Worse, we've convinced ourselves that development aid (the left's all-purpose medicine) is the key to defeating al Qaeda.

That's utter nonsense. Abdulmutallab's a rich kid. He didn't come from a deprived background, bearing the grievances of the slum. He's a graduate of a top English university. And Osama bin Laden's from a super-rich family. How does building a footbridge in Afghanistan deter them?

The System Didn't Work, But The Passengers Did

Open borders advocate Janet Napolitano, the hapless Homeland Security Secretary, has back-pedaled on her claim that the system worked. Instead (probably after an attitude adjustment from White House spin doctors), she now says the system failed miserably:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano conceded Monday that the aviation security system failed when a young man on a watch list with a U.S. visa in his pocket and a powerful explosive hidden on his body was allowed to board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

The Obama administration has ordered investigations into the two areas of aviation security — how travelers are placed on watch lists and how passengers are screened — as critics questioned how the 23-year-old Nigerian man charged in the airliner attack was allowed to board the Dec. 25 flight.

A day after saying the system worked, Napolitano backtracked, saying her words had been taken out of context.

Here's the perhaps soon-to-be-former DHS secretary doing damage control on the Today show:

Last year, Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, famously said (and then retracted) that Napolitano would be perfect for the job "because for that job, you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote, literally, 19-20 hours a day to it." It appears, however, that the governor was incorrect.

Terrorist Foothold in South America

Leaving aside yesterday's attempted terrorist attack on the Northwest Airlines jet, a counterterrorism analyst maintains that Latin America could actually be America's Achilles heel in the war on terrorism:

“There is a growing presence of Islamic activism and fundraising in Latin America,” [former FBI Special Agent James] Conway told Newsmax. “There is a significant presence of human-trafficking organizations that terror cells have and could exploit for movement of people and materials into the United States, and that should be of a major concern to us from a national-security perspective.”

Passengers Use Self Help To Foil Plane Bomber

Self help in the law in general refers to a corrective or preventive remedy taken by a private citizen to solve a problem without running to court. That's kind of what the passengers did in stopping the suicide bomber on a Northwest Airlines flight:

A Northwest Airlines passenger from Nigeria, who said he was acting on Al Qaeda's instructions, tried to blow up the plane Friday as it was landing in Detroit, law enforcement and national security officials said.

Passengers subdued the man and may have prevented him from detonating the explosives, officials said.

Meanwhile, U.S. counterterrorism officials were apparently aware of the the man's terrorist ties, but gave him a visa despite the red flags:

The father of the al Qaeda terrorist behind Friday’s attempted explosion aboard a Northwest flight bound for Detroit reported his son’s fanatical religious views to the U.S. Embassy six months ago, according to a Nigerian news outlet.

The young man, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, is the son of Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, a former Nigerian minister and bank chairman. He became wary of his son’s religious beliefs and reported his activities to the U.S. Embassy as well as Nigerian security services half a year ago, according to the Nigerian newspaper This Day.

The elder Mutallab had left his home in Katsina today, a city in Northern Nigeria, to speak with security agencies, the site reported, quoting family sources.

...A source close to the dad said he was shocked that his son was allowed to travel to this country after he’d reported his extreme views.

As with the Ft. Hood incident, lawmakers are wondering why security officials didn't take preemptive action:

Congressional lawmakers are looking to "get to the bottom" of the attempted terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound flight, pledging to hold hearings next month and raising questions over how the suspect was allegedly able to smuggle an explosive mixture onto an airplane.

Analysts and lawmakers say the incident raises troubling questions and could lead to changes in airline security which has already gone through an overhaul since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Officials also questioned whether intelligence agencies were properly sharing information about the suspect, since sources said his name was on a federal watch list even though he was not on a "no-fly list." The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, had been in an intelligence database that includes people with known or suspected terrorist ties, and officials knew about that possible connection for "some time," a U.S. official told Fox News.