We are spending $ billions bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen ... and proportional to the number of innocent civilians killed or maimed by these bombs, erupts new Al Qaeda recruits and new dots to connect.
Unfortunately, our intelligence agencies still have a problem connecting these dots, even when a father walks into our embassy in Nigeria and reports his own son.
President Bush was handed a President's Daily Brief on August 6, 2001, while vacationing in Texas, titled, "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" which stated the direct relationship between our bombs and their terror:
After US missile strikes on his base in Afghanistan in 1998, Bin Ladin told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington, according to a [--] service.
Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.
Spy Agencies Failed to Collate Clues on Terror
By Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lipton
New York Times / December 31, 2009
The National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but US spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.
The father, a wealthy businessman named Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had urgently sought help from US and Nigerian security officials when cellphone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical.
In some ways, the portrait bears a striking resemblance to the failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, despite the billions of dollars spent over the last eight years to improve the intelligence flow and secret communications across America’s national security apparatus.
In response to Cheney's attack that Obama "pretends" not to be at war against terrorists:
A White House official fired back, blaming the Bush administration as having allowed Al Qaeda to thrive while it focused on the Iraq war.
Bingo!
Perhaps, we should rethink the bombing and escalation in Afghanistan and do what Barack Obama suggested during his anti Iraq War speech that got my vote.
Obama's own advice to President Bush was to improve foreign policy, reduce oil dependency, and use intelligence to capture Osama bin Laden. which is preferable to both fighting the war in Iraq and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.
They told us that we couldn't investigate Cheney and Bush for war crimes concerning the Iraq War, because we had too many balls in the air, one of which was health care reform. Now Cheney is free to do more of the same type of propaganda on the teevee that led to the disastrous diversion from combating terrorism that was the Iraq War, only now his diversion is to attack Obama.
Cheney should have been put on trial years ago, but the Democratic leadership took impeachment off the table, and here he is rearing his head again, mucking up the works on the heels of yet another strike against our national security.
Meanwhile, we all know what has become of the health care reform for which we supposedly sacrificed justice and accountability: at the end of the day, Lieberman and the health insurance company bureaucrats got the public option, the only true competition to the status quo, down to the size where they could drown it in the bathtub a la Grover Norquist. We are left holding a mixed bag that has left the American public paying for mandates of questionable quality as the stock of health insurance corporations goes soaring through the roof.
The father of Umar did his part. He can't be faulted. He was very thorough:
Mutallab consulted with the onetime national security adviser to Nigeria’s former president. He also approached Nigeria’s National Intelligence Agency. Then he went to the US embassy in Abuja, the cousin said. There, he said, US officials essentially ignored him.
Say what?
US officials essentially ignored him.</ </p>
American officials contend that they took the father’s account seriously, but that he never signaled that his son might carry out a terrorist attack. Still, on Nov. 20, based on the father’s meeting, which included the CIA and the State Department, embassy officials wrote a cable called a Visas Viper - government jargon for a warning about terrorism - and sent it to the counterterrorism center.
The Americans could have revoked Abdulmutallab’s visa, but they chose not to. Some 1,700 visas have been revoked since the Sept. 11 attacks, but that step is almost always taken only after a review by counterterrorism officials in Washington.
Between November 20 and Christmas Day, couldn't they have gotten around to revoking Umar's visa? Is that asking too much?
Maybe, we need to come home and concentrate on the ball that is national security so that people like Umar can't get anywhere near our shores.
What seems to have worked to foil this attempted bombing is Umar's father, who did his best to warn us about his own son's extremism, and the passengers and crew on the airplane, who fought the battle against terrorism on Christmas Day and won.
The heroic and good people of Flight 253 can say, "Mission Accomplished" in the war against terror, without causing a single loss of life.
However, after all of the bombs over the past decade that have fueled the flames of terrorism by wreaking their own form of terror on innocent civilians, our militarists and intelligence centers cannot unfurl that same banner of victory.
The decision makers in America continue to choose the wrong path of war, which is a form of terror to the innocent people living in proximity to the various ground zeros targeted in the middle east, and, sadly, our leaders refuse to change course.
Innocent people, just trying to live their lives, are left to pay the price by becoming targets of the enemies our leaders make or "collateral damage" while they doggedly pursue the status quo that is war.