MAUREEN DOWD: Captain Obvious Learns The Limits Of Cool.
Captain Obvious Learns the Limits of Cool
By MAUREEN DOWD
He had applied the freshness of his independent thought to the critical matters at hand. He had convened his seminar, reviewed the reviews, analyzed the intelligence every which way, thought anew about everything, and lo and behold, he finally emerged to tell us some stuff we already knew.
We are under attack.
There is evil in the world.
Yemen is a dangerous place that breeds people who want to kill us.
Al Qaeda is determined to attack inside the United States.
Al Qaeda is casting a wide recruiting net for vulnerable young men.
Aspirational terrorists eventually become operational terrorists.
Our airports are not safe.
Metal detectors can’t detect nonmetal explosives sewn into underwear.
Our incomplete no-fly lists are more like “Welcome aboard” lists.
We still can’t connect the dots, even when the dots are flying at us like 3-D asteroids.
The sun rises in the east.
Two plus two equals four.
“We must do better,” Captain Obvious said Thursday at the White House, “in keeping dangerous people off airplanes while still facilitating air travel.”
John Brennan, the deputy national security adviser, was equally illuminating. “The intelligence,” he informed us, “fell through the cracks.”
He also offered this: “Al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.” That rings a bell.
The president and his intelligence officials stressed that these were not the same mistakes made before 9/11.
“Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence,” President Obama said, “this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Wow. That makes me feel that all those billions spent on upgrading the intelligence system were well spent.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father personally delivered a neon warning to our embassy in Nigeria, and a State Department employee quickly dropped the ball by misspelling the aspiring terrorist’s name, leading to the false assumption that he did not have a valid U.S. visa.
Border security officials figured out while he was in the air that the young man had extremist links, but inexplicably decided to wait until he landed to question him, failing to notify the pilot of his plane. After all, what harm could a foreign extremist bring to a plane over American soil.
So it wasn’t bureaucratic turf wars that caused the intelligence to fall through the cracks this time. The C.I.A. and counterterrorism agencies weren’t hoarding information and refusing to pool tips. They were just out to lunch.
And this is supposed to be progress?
I’d rather they were hoarding. It would be more reassuring to think our intelligence analysts actually knew what was going on but were hampered by power grabs than to think they were cooperative but clueless.
Even though Russ Feingold, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been pointing out since 2002 that we need to focus on Yemen — “It’s the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden and the place where Al Qaeda blew up the U.S.S. Cole and we lost 17 people,” he impatiently notes — the president said that the intelligence community was caught off guard by the attack planned by the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, even though “we knew that they sought to strike the United States, and that they were recruiting operatives to do so.”
Senator Feingold told me that “this is obviously an international network and we have to start thinking about it that way rather than as a country-by-country eradication process.”
Unlike the Republicans, who have yet to take responsibility for a single disastrous thing they did, President Obama said “ultimately the buck stops with me.”
But when he failed to immediately step up to the microphones in Hawaii after the Christmas terror and thank the passengers for bravely foiling the plot that his intelligence community had failed to see, President Cool reached the limits of cool.
No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.
Our professorial president is no feckless W., biking through Katrina. He is no doubt on top of the crisis in terms of studying it top to bottom. But his inner certainly creates an outer disconnect.
He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.
He’s more like the aloof father who’s turned the Situation Room into a Seminar Room.
By MAUREEN DOWD
He had applied the freshness of his independent thought to the critical matters at hand. He had convened his seminar, reviewed the reviews, analyzed the intelligence every which way, thought anew about everything, and lo and behold, he finally emerged to tell us some stuff we already knew.
We are under attack.
There is evil in the world.
Yemen is a dangerous place that breeds people who want to kill us.
Al Qaeda is determined to attack inside the United States.
Al Qaeda is casting a wide recruiting net for vulnerable young men.
Aspirational terrorists eventually become operational terrorists.
Our airports are not safe.
Metal detectors can’t detect nonmetal explosives sewn into underwear.
Our incomplete no-fly lists are more like “Welcome aboard” lists.
We still can’t connect the dots, even when the dots are flying at us like 3-D asteroids.
The sun rises in the east.
Two plus two equals four.
“We must do better,” Captain Obvious said Thursday at the White House, “in keeping dangerous people off airplanes while still facilitating air travel.”
John Brennan, the deputy national security adviser, was equally illuminating. “The intelligence,” he informed us, “fell through the cracks.”
He also offered this: “Al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.” That rings a bell.
The president and his intelligence officials stressed that these were not the same mistakes made before 9/11.
“Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence,” President Obama said, “this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Wow. That makes me feel that all those billions spent on upgrading the intelligence system were well spent.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father personally delivered a neon warning to our embassy in Nigeria, and a State Department employee quickly dropped the ball by misspelling the aspiring terrorist’s name, leading to the false assumption that he did not have a valid U.S. visa.
Border security officials figured out while he was in the air that the young man had extremist links, but inexplicably decided to wait until he landed to question him, failing to notify the pilot of his plane. After all, what harm could a foreign extremist bring to a plane over American soil.
So it wasn’t bureaucratic turf wars that caused the intelligence to fall through the cracks this time. The C.I.A. and counterterrorism agencies weren’t hoarding information and refusing to pool tips. They were just out to lunch.
And this is supposed to be progress?
I’d rather they were hoarding. It would be more reassuring to think our intelligence analysts actually knew what was going on but were hampered by power grabs than to think they were cooperative but clueless.
Even though Russ Feingold, who is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been pointing out since 2002 that we need to focus on Yemen — “It’s the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden and the place where Al Qaeda blew up the U.S.S. Cole and we lost 17 people,” he impatiently notes — the president said that the intelligence community was caught off guard by the attack planned by the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, even though “we knew that they sought to strike the United States, and that they were recruiting operatives to do so.”
Senator Feingold told me that “this is obviously an international network and we have to start thinking about it that way rather than as a country-by-country eradication process.”
Unlike the Republicans, who have yet to take responsibility for a single disastrous thing they did, President Obama said “ultimately the buck stops with me.”
But when he failed to immediately step up to the microphones in Hawaii after the Christmas terror and thank the passengers for bravely foiling the plot that his intelligence community had failed to see, President Cool reached the limits of cool.
No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.
Our professorial president is no feckless W., biking through Katrina. He is no doubt on top of the crisis in terms of studying it top to bottom. But his inner certainly creates an outer disconnect.
He’s so sure of himself and his actions that he fails to see that he misses the moment to be president — to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders, who reassures and instructs the public at traumatic moments.
He’s more like the aloof father who’s turned the Situation Room into a Seminar Room.
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