Even the WashingtonPost Sees His Incompetence

[PoliticalChic]

"President Obama blamed "the system" for failing to stop al Qaeda's Christmas Day bombing plot. The weakness with that excuse is that Mr. Obama fails to connect the dots between the systemic failure and his administration's year-long record of destroying the morale of the intelligence community.

Mr. Obama has destroyed this sense of trust. On his watch, the intelligence community has suffered a year of body blows. He made great theater of signing an executive order closing the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In April, the president authorized the release of the so-called "torture memos" on enhanced interrogation techniques used against detainees, and suggested that Congress establish a bipartisan review panel to look into the authorization of extraordinary interrogation methods.

Mr. Obama said, "for those who carried out ... these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance ... provided from the White House, I do not think it's appropriate for them to be prosecuted." He then authorized Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to begin an investigation, even though career prosecutors at the Justice Department already had examined the circumstances and found no CIA violations of law.
Considering the Obama administration has made targeted killings by drones the centerpiece of its counterterrorism strategy, this charge seemed gratuitous and hypocritical.

These and other events helped drive morale in the intelligence community to new lows. Mr. Obama's actions have created a climate that punishes risk-taking and ensures that dots go unconnected. CIA Director Leon Panetta warned last May, "If they start to use these issues as political clubs to beat each other up with, that's when we not only pay a price but this country pays a price." We now have intelligence agencies whose unofficial mottos are "stay in your lane," and "cover your rear."

There is an old saying in intelligence circles: Big operation, big risk; small operation, small risk; no operation, no risk. The president's proposed "solution" to the failures of the intelligence system will reinforce a climate of mistrust in which it will be difficult to take the risks necessary to make the system work. And next time we may not be so lucky.

EDITORIAL: Obama's havoc to the intel system - Washington Times


No, President Obama isn't an empty suit...

he's a chalk outline!

 

[del]

your link is to the washington times

 

[PoliticalChic]

your link is to the washington times

Opps. How do I change the title?

 

[Sunni Man]

The "system" was in place many years before Obama took office.

 

[Ravi]

I'd suggest retitling the thread:

Right Wing Washington Times criticizes Obama, sun rises in the east

 

[PoliticalChic]

I'd suggest retitling the thread:

Right Wing Washington Times criticizes Obama, sun rises in the east

How do I "retitle"?

 

[Ravi]

You have to get a mod to do it.

 

[Joe Steel]

your link is to the washington times

Doesn't make a lot of difference. They're both rightwing rags.

 

[jillian]

I have a better title...

rightwingnut WashTimes...and the Rev Moon hate anything that's not rightwingnuttilicious.

two fallacious thread titles in one day.

oops...

 

[Annie]

your link is to the washington times

I like this piece, though it's not the post either.

The Daily Beast: Stop Blaming the CIA « Marc Thiessen

...President Obama laid blame for this failure on the agency he has put under siege since his second day in office: the CIA. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” he declared this week, “it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we had …. That’s not acceptable and I will not tolerate it.” But the President’s chief counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, told a different story, acknowledging that we did not, in fact, have all the intelligence we needed: “We did have the information throughout the course of the summer and fall about … plans to carry out attacks,” Brennan said. “We had snippets of information …. We may have had a partial name. We might have had an indication of a Nigerian. But there was nothing that brought it all together.”

The ability to detain and question senior terrorist operatives is not a luxury we can do without; it is essential to preventing new attacks on our country.

The question is: why did we have nothing that brought all the “snippets” of information together? Because within 48 hours after taking office, President Obama eliminated the only tool that would allow the intelligence community to do so: the CIA program to interrogate senior terrorist leaders. Thanks to Obama, America no longer have the capability to detain and question the only individuals who know how the information fits together—the terrorists themselves.
In the age of terror, our enemies do not have large armies or flotillas of warships that can be observed by spies or tracked by satellites. Instead, the terrorists conspire in secret, hide among civilians, and attack us from within. Their plans to kill innocent men, women, and children are known only to a handful of cruel men.

This means there are essentially three ways to gain information about terrorist attacks:
...

The ability to detain and question senior terrorist operatives is not a luxury we can do without; it is essential to preventing new attacks on our country. This is something John Brennan once understood. Asked in a 2007 interview if enhanced interrogation techniques were necessary to keep America safe, Brennan replied: “Would the U.S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities? I would say yes.”

On his second day in office Obama eliminated this capability—and this, in his own advisor’s assessment, handicapped our country in the fight against terror. Indeed, President Obama has admitted as much. Speaking at the CIA soon after shutting down the CIA interrogation program, Obama told officials, “I’m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means we’re operating with one hand tied behind our back … So yes, you’ve got a harder job. And so do I. And that’s okay.”

It’s not okay, Mr. President. It almost caused another attack.

 

[jillian]

Again other than you taking the opportunity to bash, it's irrelevant.

she's pretending that somehow a newspaper SHE BELIEVES normally supportive of the president questioned his competence...

and your article?

*shrug*

 

[Annie]

Again other than you taking the opportunity to bash, it's irrelevant.

she's pretending that somehow a newspaper SHE BELIEVES normally supportive of the president questioned his competence...

and your article?

*shrug*

Meds? Once again his incompetance, following his making serious mistakes early on through inexperience. 'We' are all paying the price for the results of the last election.

 

[Conspiracist]

I have a better title...

rightwingnut WashTimes...and the Rev Moon hate anything that's not rightwingnuttilicious.

two fallacious thread titles in one day.

oops...

She said "rightwingnuttilicious"

Huh huh huh huh huh

 

[LibocalypseNow]

Yes even some in the Obama-Run Mainstream Media are beginning to become a bit disillusioned with this White House. What took em so long? Yikes!

 

[PoliticalChic]

Again other than you taking the opportunity to bash, it's irrelevant.

she's pretending that somehow a newspaper SHE BELIEVES normally supportive of the president questioned his competence...

and your article?

*shrug*

First, I would like to apologize again to all readers of this thread, for sourcing this editorial as WashingtonPost, instead of the correct WashingtonTimes.

As for "...she's pretending ..." This is dishonest, as I never pretend nor disemble. I stand behind what ever I post. As I do now.

"...somehow a newspaper SHE BELIEVES normally supportive of the president ..."
Now, here we have a quandry. Either Jillian is disembling herself, or posing as a failed mindreader, or she is not very perceptive as I have never stated that I believed that the WashTimes is other than conservative.

Further, I suspect that Jillian knows me better than to actually think that I am not aware of the perspective of my reading material.

Now, as for the President's competence, I am making such a thesis: this President has reached his level of his incompetence, and is not prepared for this job.

Our college prof President should be fullly aware of the effect of allowing his A.G. to pillory the CIA, and others who have kept this country safe for seven year. And if unaware of human nature, he should be congnizant of the infamous history of the Democrat Party in weakening our intelligence community, to wit:


1. "The real aberration occurred in the mid-1970s when the United States granted its legislative branch the greatest control over intelligence matters of any Western nation, and overturned the system which had prevailed in the United States since the Founding.

2. The damage done to the CIA by this congressional oversight regime (Democrat-controlled Pike and Church Committees) is quite extensive. The committees increased the number of CIA officials subject to Senate confirmation, condemned the agency for its contacts with unscrupulous characters, prohibited any further contact with these bad characters, insisted that the United States not engage or assist in any coup which may harm a foreign leader, and overwhelmed the agency with interminable requests for briefings (some 600 alone in 1996).

3.Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, who led the charge in the mid-1990s to prevent the CIA from hiring unsavory characters. Torricelli rallied to the defense of State Department employee Robert Nuccio, who leaked classified material dealing with CIA operations ...

4. On some occasions, members of Congress threatened to leak information in order to derail covert operations they found personally repugnant. (Senator Leahy).

5. [C]hairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden,…[t]he Delaware Democrat was one of seventeen Senators who voted in 1974 to ban all covert operations, and proudly noted during his 1988 campaign for president that he had threatened to “go public” with covert action plans by the Reagan administration, causing them to cancel the operations."
Congressional Oversight and the Crippling of the CIA

My thesis is that it is incompetent of the President to continue the emasculation of the intelligence community, and there is evidence in his recent pronouncements that he is beginning to agree.

And, speaking of pretending, I challenge Jillian to counter, not the newspaper in which the editorial was found, but the actual import, and premises of the editorial.

 

[Catbert]

Poor guy's so confused. Just recently the man who "won" and his administration attempted to prosecute our own intelligence agents for doing their job. So now he's upset that they didn't? Why is this unskilled and uninformed man in the White House?

 

[PoliticalChic]

Poor guy's so confused. Just recently the man who "won" and his administration attempted to prosecute our own intelligence agents for doing their job. So now he's upset that they didn't? Why is this unskilled and uninformed man in the White House?

Throughout the year there have been indications that this President has a thin skin, doesn't brook criticism, and has said to some who didn't toe the party line, " Don't think we're not keeping score, brother."

But the pattern of letting underlings take the blame for errors, goes way furthe, as in the attempt to claim that some in the CIA tried to set up his administration by withholding intelligence information... a suggestion from the White House, via Richard Wolfe, that CIA might allow hundreds to be killed because they were unhappy with the President.

This is either psychotic, or crimally slanderous.

Check this out:

"Wolffe, an MSNBC analyst who has met one-on-one with the president many times for his book, said the White House sees the situation "more as an intelligence lapse more than a situation of airport security faults."

Wolffe said he was speaking to White House aides earlier in the day and that Obama remains "angry" about the incident.

"The question here is why didn't the centralized system of intelligence that was set up after 9/11, why didn't it work? Is this conspiracy or cockup?" Wolffe asked.

"Seems that the president is leaning very much towards thinking this was a systemic failure by individuals, who maybe had an alternative agenda."(emphasis mine)


Olbermann asks, "Is the implication there that there is at least a possibility that somebody understood how serious this could be and yet withheld information to make some other part of the counterterrorism system look bad?"

"That has got to be an area that the White House is looking into. Motives can be hard to assess," Wolffe said. "That's where this internal inquiry for the moment has to go."
Olbermann tells Wolffe, "What you're describing is a far bigger threat" than a man on a plane with explosives.

Cockup, Conspiracy or Just Plain Confusion? Sorting Out Olberman's Segment on Flight 253 | TPM LiveWire


Was this a trial-balloon, as in "they're trying to destroy my administration" or "see- it wasn't my fault."

Watch the video at the link.