President Obama’s Initial Reaction to Recent Terrorist Act Lacked Urgency, Decisive Leadership

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/12/30/2009-12-30_its_time_prez_for_you_to_get_serious.html

Originally Published:Wednesday, December 30th 2009, 1:59 AM
Updated: Wednesday, December 30th 2009, 1:59 AM

It’s time to get serious, Obama! The president uncharacteristically lacked a sense of urgency in his address of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed bombing of Flight 253.

The attempt to blow Northwest Flight 253 out of the air was planned as an attack on the United States and very nearly succeeded in accomplishing that horrific goal. The moment demanded inspiring, decisive presidential leadership.

America waited four days for a glimmer.

President Obama‘s initial response Monday was too long in coming, too cool in delivery and too removed from the extreme gravity of the plot.

Tuesday, he spoke more assertively, acknowledging what everyone else had long ago concluded: that unacceptable security failures had enabled 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to smuggle high explosives onto a Detroit-bound jet.

Before his first remarks on Monday, Obama had left a vacuum, and into that 76-hour empty space rushed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, whose ineptitude made a mockery of her position and threw millions of fliers into continuing states of confusion.

What the public was left with was a never-to-be-repeated case study in crisis mismanagement. It’s time to get a grip, Mr. President.

The attempted bombing occurred at 11:30 a.m. Friday, Christmas. When finally Obama spoke after the weekend, he vowed to hunt down “all who were involved” and promised, as has become standard, to “use every element of our national power to disrupt, dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us.”

Nothing less is required, and there can be no arguing with the stated mission.

Even so, Obama’s description of Abdulmutallab as an “isolated extremist” was remarkable and disturbing. This radicalized young Nigerian is nothing of the sort. He operated, in fact, as an Al Qaeda-recruited, Al Qaeda-supplied, Al Qaeda-directed foot soldier – as, to put it directly, an enemy combatant, and not as the criminal “suspect” of Obama’s description.

In similarly distant fashion, the President ordered up a “review” of how Abdulmutallab smuggled explosives onto the jet and a “review” of how he slipped through the government’s various terror watch lists despite signals of clear and present danger.

Missing then was a statement about those obvious and unacceptable security cracks; the name, rank and serial number of the officials who would conduct the inquiries, and a deadline for completion and a report to the public. Tuesday, Obama filled in those rather basic blanks.

His seeming initial lack of urgency was uncharacteristic in a leader who calls himself a “deadline” executive for his practice of setting same in order to get things done. Most famously, Obama has established a deadline, albeit a slipping one, for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

There, the apparent balance had been off by a ton: the pressure of time applied on behalf of detainees, many of whom are avowed enemies of the nation, a lighter hand put to work for those worried about terrorist infiltration of the United States. Which basically covers every man, woman and child in the country.

It is all but certain that Obama’s reviews will reveal screwups that overwhelmingly are not of his administration’s making. The record shows that he inherited the Transportation Security Administration‘s long and wasteful botch of airport screening, as well as intelligence databases of unwieldy proportions.

Obama is, however, accountable for his own anti-terror appointees and policies.

Among them, his costly and wrongheaded order to try key Guantanamo detainees in civilian courts, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, architect of 9/11, in Manhattan Federal.

Among them, his determination to release selected detainees into foreign hands and hope for the best, as President George W. Bush did with two Yemenites who wound up leading the Al Qaeda offshoot that sponsored Abdulmutallab.

Among them, Napolitano, who will never live down her declaration that “the system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days.” Or her previous clanger that the 9/11 hijackers had entered the U.S. through Canada. Or her euphemistic airbrushing of terrorism as a “man-caused” disaster.

Ultimately, Obama will be measured by a single, unforgiving standard of accountability. It will not be that he affords constitutional rights to terrorists. It will not be that he distinguishes himself by 180 degrees from his predecessor. It will not be that he extends a hand to the Muslim world and refrains from speaking of Islamist terror. It will be whether, on his watch, America suffers a terror attack from abroad, as almost happened on Christmas.
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