Fort Hood Massacre

Guess What Napolitano & Brennan Said They Were ‘Shocked’ by?
Napolitano was most “shocked” by Al Qaeda’s “determination” and its tactic of using an “individual” in a terror attack as opposed to using multiple hijackers like they did on 9/11. Al Qaeda is determined? Shocking. Al Qaeda uses single suicide bombers? Wow, they’ve never tried that before. Brennan was most “shocked” that Al Qaeda in Yemen was able to launch attacks on the homeland. Funny, because both the Arkansas and Ft. Hood attacks had Yemen connections.

Intel Failure in Ft. Hood Case Preceded Airline Attack

Shortly after alleged gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire at Fort Hood and killed 13 people, the Pentagon’s top intelligence officer reportedly sent a classified report to the White House detailing a prior failure to connect the dots.

According to CBS News, the 18 e-mails Hasan exchanged with radical Muslim imam Anwar al-Awlaki leading up to the rampage that were being monitored by a wiretap were never seen by the terrorism task force that was determining whether the Army major posed a threat.

After the task force had concluded Hasan didn’t pose a threat, it didn’t request later information on his exchanges with Awlaki.

Because Hasan was a member of the military, the FBI showed the e-mails to a Pentagon investigator with the note “comm” written on it. The word reportedly was seen as meaning “communication” to the Pentagon official, but to the FBI it meant “commissioned officer.”

Thus, no alert was raised in regard to Hasan’s communications with Awlaki.

The incident at Fort Hood mirrors U.S intelligence agencies’ failure to pull together fragments of data needed to foil the failed Christmas Day bomb plot on the Detroit-bound airliner.

Officials had received fragments of information as early as October about an alleged terror recruit they later learned was Nigerian suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

President Obama on Thursday called for intel agencies to do a better job of recognizing serious terror threats that coincided with the release of a declassified summary of a two-week review of the incident.

CNN Reporter To Brennan: Isn’t Your Counterterrorism Plan A Bit Basic?

Obama Pretends to Get Tough on Yemen

Dan Pfeiffer, White House Communications Director, took to the official White House blog Wednesday to post a response to critics of Barack Obama and his handling of counterterrorism. Pfeiffer believes that the intelligence failure that led to the failed bombing on Christmas day — nearly a year into Obama’s presidency — can be blamed on a war launched almost seven years ago in Iraq. The banality of his claim is surpassed only by its absurdity.

What’s more interesting is Pfeiffer’s claim that his boss has finally refocused U.S. counterterrorism on its proper targets in places like Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen.

Pfeiffer mentions Yemen twice. That’s not a surprise considering the rise to prominence of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki, both based in Yemen. Awlaki, a senior al Qaeda cleric and recruiter, has offered guidance (at least) to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, and Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Flight 253 bomber. And Abdulmutallab reportedly had extensive training and support from AQAP. As a result, Yemen — a nation unfamiliar to most Americans — has been on our front pages and leading our broadcasts in the past few weeks. So Pfeiffer wants everyone to know that Obama, in his “war against al Qaeda,” has been busy building “partnerships” to target terrorist safe-havens in, among other places, Yemen.

To coin a phrase: What a difference a year makes.

On January 22, 2009, Obama signed an executive order requiring the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within twelve months. To near universal praise, Obama claimed his action would allow America once again to occupy the “moral high ground” and to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism.”

On the same day that Obama made his announcement, the State Department website www.America.gov published an interview with US Ambassador to Yemen Stephen Seche. No other country would be as important to closing Guantanamo Bay as Yemen. Some 100 of the 248 detainees there at the end of the Bush administration were Yemenis. And, with only a few exceptions, those that remained at the facility remained there for a reason. They were seasoned jihadists and they were extremely dangerous.

That fact made Seche’s comments notable. He said that it was the goal of the new administration to repatriate a “majority” of the Yemenis at Gitmo. And not just send them to their native country to be detained, but so that they could “make a future for themselves here.”

“Certainly we would like to be able to bring them back to Yemen and have them integrate themselves back into their own society with their families,” said Seche. Although he acknowledged some “inherent risks” in returning the detainees to the general population, Seche suggested that only a few of the detainees present real problems. “Except in the case perhaps of some very hardcore elements, we believe that the majority of these detainees can be put productively into a reintegration program with the goal over time of enabling them to find a way back into Yemeni society without posing a security risk.”

The statement was shocking. More than a dozen of the Yemenis held at Guantanamo Bay at the time were alleged by the US government to have been personal bodyguards for Osama bin Laden. Many of the other Yemenis at Gitmo had been trained at al Qaeda training camps (74 percent) or stayed at al Qaeda guesthouses (74 percent). Others had been captured fighting Americans or alongside senior al Qaeda figures — 15 of them captured in raids that netted top al Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi Binalshibh. Still others had admitted their terrorist involvement without coercion and in open hearings — sometimes accompanying their confessions with threats to one day kill again.

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Why Is Hillary’s State Department Getting UndyBomber Pass?

Forget about no-fly lists, full-body scanners and air marshals. All the loud recriminations about who should have done what to stop the UndyBomber from boarding a plane to Detroit on Christmas Day miss a more fundamental point: Young, single, rootless foreign Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should never, ever have received a temporary visa into our country in the first place. No visa, no plane ticket. No ticket, no passage to airline jihad.

Even absent the intelligence we had on this al-Qaida-trained operative before his fateful trip, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was required to know better than to issue a coveted entrance pass to a globe-trotting, Nigerian-born nomad. Under federal law (section 214(b) of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act to be precise), State Department consular officials must determine that foreigners applying for temporary visas (students, tourists and business people) will in fact return to their home countries as required and will not abuse their visa privileges.

This means making sure that the temporary visa applicant has strong ties to his native land. It’s supposed to be a tough burden to overcome. Yet, Abdulmutallab showed no such propensities at the time he applied for his temporary visa at the U.S. Embassy in London in June 2008. He was a 20-something student who had flitted from Nigeria to Yemen to Togo to England without a family or job. He was, in other words, a textbook itinerant waving more red flags than a bullfighter.

Question: How much due diligence did the State Department consular official on the front line who interviewed Abdulmutallab actually show? Reports say it took just four days for his visa to be approved. Barely two months later, Abdulmutallab turned up in Houston for a two-week seminar at Al Maghrib Institute, a Muslim Brotherhood-tied Islamic education center that has been dubbed “Jihad U” by veteran terrorism analysts.

Now, I’m presuming that a consular official did in fact interview Abdulmutallab before rubber-stamping his visa. Before the September 11 attacks, countless visa applicants — including 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers — skipped personal appearance requirements and bypassed the interview process as a convenience provided by Foggy Bottom panderers. This was supposed to change.

I asked the State Department Thursday for more information about the presumed consular office interview and hasty approval of Abdulmutallab’s visa. Spokeswoman Megan Mattson invoked confidentiality rules protecting his visa form. But there is an overriding public interest in what his application might reveal about our atrociously lax consulate practices. The General Accounting Office obtained and released the 9/11 hijackers’ temporary visa forms, which showed that basic information about where they were headed (two hijackers wrote “Wasantwn”) and what business they claimed to be doing (one wrote “teater” as his occupation) was suspiciously shoddy.

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