The Memo That Bush Had...It Pales...

[Annie]

While I think that al Queda certainly should have been taken more seriously by both Clinton and Bush, yes, even in the opening months, both pales compared to this:

Obama says anti-terror 'buck' stops with him - Yahoo! News

Obama has the hindsight of 9/11 and all that went before and since, yet only now is he 'getting serious', which I'll believe when the results come in.

...In the president's bleak assessment and a White House-released report about what went wrong, the country got an alarming picture of a post-Sept. 11 debacle: an intelligence community that failed to understand what it had. U.S. intelligence officials had enough information to identify the suspect as an al-Qaida terrorist operative and keep him off a plane but still could not identify and disrupt the plot, and security measures didn't catch him, either.

Obama announced about a dozen changes designed to fix that, including new terror watch list guidelines, wider and quicker distribution of intelligence reports, stronger analysis of those reports, international partnerships and an interagency effort to develop next-generation airport screening technologies.

More inquiries are on the way.

"It is appalling that we have not learned from our mistakes, eight years after the worst terror attacks in our nation's history," said Sen. Olympia Snow, R-Maine, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will hold its first hearing on the subject on Jan. 21, probably in private.

While Obama promised improved security, his solutions were laced with bureaucratic reshuffling.

Americans might be surprised that the government was not already taking some of the steps Obama ordered. For instance, he directed the intelligence community to begin assigning direct responsibility for following up leads on high-priority threats.
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