There were a ton of failings with the Detroit underwear bomber. But I don’t believe these particular failings should be leading to this quote by Dick Cheney:
“[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe,” Cheney said in a statement to POLITICO. “Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation—the restructuring of American society.”
All the failings leading to this bomber would have happened under a Republican unless you believe that al-Qaeda had not been working on this little underwear scheme under Bush because Bush was such a tough guy.
The one thing that gets me is how can a young man with a Muslim name flying from Lagos to Detroit without luggage not be given a once over??
That has little to do with this President and everything to do with political correctness that has been running rampant for years.
So yes, fix the “system” that clearly failed. But until and unless that system includes some serious profiling, we’ll know that no administration, left or right is taking this was on extremist Muslim terrorists seriously.
And until people in the administration who never want to be identified quit leaking stories to the press for reasons I’d have to say that it’s the media that seems to think this really isn’t war.
UPDATE: We will only ever hear about the failures of intelligence systems and not the successes which happen every day. We need to realize that.
