Evil, Heartless Who Question Free Lunches!

In a survey conducted earlier this week, 1,000 American blondes were asked if they would sleep with Tiger Woods and 89 per cent said: never again". ...

Another sector down the tubes? Only a matter of time? You decide and soon will be able to. Perhaps a bit overboard in terms of the future of home, auto and life insurance.

One thing is for sure. If you want more of something subsidize it! Liberals understand this and that is how they build dependent constituencies - think welfare recipients, unions, school teachers etc.. It is all done under the rubric of caring for your fellow citizens. Those who question such beneficence are tagged as evil and heartless.

FDR understood this and used The Great Depression as a cover. Obama is trying to close the lock FDR left open.

Yes, Agnes, there are free lunches and all you have to do is sit down and eat from the plate of others. (See 1 below.)

You have 8 months to get your act together. (See 2 below.)

Administration considers pressure. Two key Senators respond. (See 2a below.)

America has a contingency plan. You would hope so but is the Pentagon's generals conflicted?.

The question is will a contingency plan be implemented and effective?

Trucks that remain in the fire house, in the event of a fire, are useless and if they arrive incapable of putting out the fire that ain't so good either. (See 3 below.)

Giving a good imitation and losing David Broder. (See 4 below.)

The latest horror show playing at your local airport. (See 5 below.)

Has the New York Times finally unleashed its dogs?

Maureen Dowd and Helene Cooper dump!

Dowd makes the point I have been making - when Obama talks he lectures himself - about what we already know!

Helene Cooper writes about the wimp factor. (See 6 and 6a below.)

I told my wife after Obama was elected, in time, the press and media would turn on him because they elected and protected him and would have to defend what little' integrity' they had 'left' if he screwed up badly as he has been doing.

When the long knives are unsheathed by his own protectors that is not a favorable omen.

Tying our hands. (See 7 below.)

Some wise humor. (See 8 below.)

Dick



1)The End of Insurance
By Keith Riler

Barack Obama's health care plan ensures spiraling costs and will convert health insurance companies into cost-plus health reimbursement utilities, or else bankrupt them completely. Health insurance as we know it (think home/auto/life) will no longer exist. The president's plan also provides for taxpayer-funded abortion, making abortion even cheaper and increasing its frequency.

Insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed and known small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss. ...There are two elements that must be at least estimable, if not formally calculable: the probability of loss, and the attendant cost. ...The essential risk is often aggregation. If the same event can cause losses to numerous policyholders ... the ability of that insurer to issue policies becomes constrained.


A key insurance concept is the need for a large, diversified pool of policyholders so that the insurance company can predict the pool's catastrophic events, and so that such events will be rare.

Any concentration of risk in the insurance pool will increase premiums, given the negative impact of those excess payouts on the insurance company's bottom line.

Obama and Reid have produced a bill that turns this insurance concept on its head by i) preventing underwriting based on medical risk and ii) requiring citizens (and employers) to purchase insurance or pay a fee.

This combination guarantees an adverse selection problem whereby healthy people will pay the cheaper fee until sick and in need of insurance, whereupon they will enroll for non-deniable insurance. Risk pools will become sick pools, and insurance will become a pass-through vehicle for the cost of sick policyholders. The benefit of healthy participants, formerly shared by all policyholders, will be eliminated.


Risk-sharing is another key insurance concept. The policyholder and the insurer share risks and costs, but in exchange, the policyholder is mostly or fully protected against catastrophic economic loss (a home burning down, death, or expensive illness). When the policyholder retains non-catastrophic but more frequent expenses, the cost of the insurance (the premium) is reduced because the insurance company need charge less to make the same shareholder return. Obama and Reid have produced a bill that must raise policyholder premiums because it increases insurance company expenses by i) taxing drugs, devices, and policies; ii) eliminating "unreasonable" annual or lifetime limits on insurance company payouts; and iii) establishing maximum out-of-pocket limits for policyholders.

Because every liberal Democratic policy must be rooted in class envy, Barack Obama has vilified the health insurance companies. His lynch-mob sentiment is again defied by facts -- these insurance "robber barons" are not very profitable, nestled somewhere between the 35th- and 86th-most profitable U.S. industries, with a 2-3% return on sales.
Nonetheless, Obama and Reid reassure us that profits will be regulated through state exchanges, cost incurrence mandated, and minimum policy standards established. In other words, health insurance pricing, profits, and products will be governmentally determined. That's a regulated public utility, a framework typically used to address monopolistic situations (not the case with health insurers and potentially unconstitutional).

There is little difference between numerous companies whose pricing, profits, and products are determined by the government and one government-run company. In this light, the objections of Howard Dean regarding the lack of a "public option" seem to be disingenuous charades. He protests too loudly.

Public utilities have historically raised prices through "rate cases," wherein the utility presents evidence that operating costs have risen, resulting in unacceptably low shareholder returns and thus the need for higher rates. Historically, gas and power utility company rate cases targeted 10-12% shareholder returns. This is interesting, given that insurance company shareholder returns currently average 11%. This bill's expensive adverse-selection problems and cost increases must result in an escalation of premiums if insurance companies are to remain in business and earn utility-type returns.

Obama's and Reid's plan not only increases costs as described above, but also by requiring coverage of numerous non-catastrophic ($25-$400) items -- abortion, prescription drugs, lab services, wellness and preventative services, oral care, and vision care. For all these reasons, the bill will dramatically increase insurance company costs with one of only two possible conclusions -- premiums will increase commensurate with costs through the utility model (government-controlled health care), or government-imposed price controls will drive private sector players out of business (government-owned health care).

The Senate bill also funds abortion. If you are confused on that point, that's a desired effect of its complexity. Nothing about states opting in/out or policyholders paying a separate $12 premium for a $400 procedure changes this. The reason Obama favors the Senate over the House version (that directly prohibits federal funding of abortion) is obvious, given his pro-abortion record.


A baby's heart begins beating about 20 days, hiccups begin 52 days, and organs function eight weeks after conception. In a nauseatingly ironic nod to this the season of Herod the Great's slaughter of the holy innocents in Bethlehem, Obama the Great pushed for the inclusion of federally funded abortions. This is true despite his recent statement that "under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions." This tax-funded subsidy will dramatically increase the number of annual victims from 1.2 million babies currently, accelerating the climb to 50 million victims since Roe v. Wade (eight times the Holocaust).

Minority babies have been disproportionately effected because most abortion facilities target lower-income mothers unaware of pro-life choices and the availability of prenatal care. (Eighty percent of Planned Parenthood locations are in minority neighborhoods.) Since Roe v. Wade, it is estimated that one-third of the black population has been eliminated, killing 13 million black babies totaling 40+% of all abortions despite the fact that only 12% of all U.S. women are black. How's that for disparate impact and racial profiling? President Obama's promotion of (the choice of) eliminating babies and black genocide is established, ambitious, and growing. Is this "post-racism"? If so, post-racists kill black babies with the same vigor that post-feminists savage female governors. Abortion is their shared passion.

In their mono-dimensional, not-Bush perma-campaign, the Democrats have slipped into a mantra of "something is better than nothing/change is good." This deceit of false choices sets too low a bar. This logic has already proven seriously flawed and costly, as in Harry Reid's declaration of U.S. defeat in Iraq in 2007, the election of Barak Obama in 2008, the failure of the stimulus/multiplier effect in 2009, and health care in 2010.
Obama and friends have created a moral, social, and economic abomination that is a lie and a violation of their duty to the electorate and the unborn. The Senate bill eliminates insurance as we know it, guarantees escalating costs for many reasons, inserts the government into private health care, funds costs on the backs of the elderly, and sends us to work to pay for someone to abort their child (opposed 3:1 in recent surveys).

2)Netanyahu: Israel will resume West Bank building in 8 months
By Mazal Mualem, Haaretz Correspondent

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday reminded coalition members that Israel's freeze on construction in West Bank settlements was only temporary, saying: "In another eight months, we'll start building again."

Netanyahu also told the ministers that Israel was interested in seeing peace talks with the Palestinians begin as soon as possible. "We want to renew negotiations without negotiations," he said.

Under pressure from the Obama administration, Netanyahu imposed a limited, 10-month moratorium on November 25 on housing starts in West Bank settlements, saying he hoped the move would help restart negotiations suspended for the past year.

But he excluded East Jerusalem and nearby annexed areas of the West Bank, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has not budged from his demand for a complete settlement freeze before talks can resume.

Nabil Abu Rdeinah, a spokesman for Abbas, on Sunday rejected Netanyahu's accusations Palestinians were to blame for a lack of progress toward a statehood deal.

"Israel continues settlement building in violation of the road map," Abu Rdainah said.

At the meeting with his coalition members on Sunday, the prime minister also declared Israel would not free "terrorist icons" as part of a prisoner exchange deal now being discussed with Hamas to see the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

He added that Israel would stand firm on its pledge to see some of the terrorists set for released exiled away from the West Bank.

Earlier Sunday, Netanyahu told a weekly cabinet session that 20 mortar bombs and rockets had been fired at Israel from the Hamas-ruled territory last week, adding:

"I view this very seriously. The government's policy is clear, any shooting at our territory will receive an immediate and powerful response."

Netanyahu told his cabinet Israel had targeted factories where rockets were manufactured and tunnels along Gaza's border with Egypt, where he charged "Iran smuggles in missiles and rockets" into Gaza, naming an arch-foe Israel accuses of arming militants.

His remarks came after two Palestinians were killed on the Gaza border. The IDF denied involvement in that incident.

A short time later, four mortar shells fired from Gaza exploded in the Western Negev .

2a)Key U.S. senators slam threat to withhold Israel loan guarantees
By Barak Ravid

Two key U.S. senators on Sunday dismissed Mideast envoy George Mitchell's suggestion that Washington withhold loan guarantees to pressure Israel.

"I don't think it's helpful and I don't agree with it," Republican John McCain said during a visit to Jerusalem. Independent Joe Lieberman, meanwhile, pledged a fight in Congress against any such move.

Israeli officials were up in arms Sunday after Mitchell posed the suggestion, meant to press Jerusalem to make concessions in negotiations with the Palestinians.

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz saying that Israel was "doing just fine" without American loan guarantees.

"We don't need to use these guarantees," Israeli media quoted Steinitz as saying. "We are doing just fine. But several months ago we agreed with the American treasury on guarantees for 2010 and 2011, and there were no conditions."

The finance minister added that Israel was making every effort to advance peace talks with the Palestinians.


Talks broke down a year ago and have not resumed because the Palestinians insist that Israel first halt all construction on disputed lands they want for a future state. Israel says the Palestinians should return to the negotiating table without conditions.

Mitchell, when asked in a television interview last week what sort of pressure could be applied to Israel, replied that "under American law, the United States can withhold support on loan guarantees to Israel."

Mitchell told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose that George W. Bush's administration had done so in the past. But he quickly added that he preferred persuasion to sanctions.

Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar also addressed Mitchell's remark, saying at the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday that Israel will always act in accordance with its own needs, and not yield to external pressure. "The American administration knows that those who are holding up the negotiations are the Palestinians. Israel made many concessions while the Palestinians didn't do a thing."

Environment Protection Minister Gilad Erdan said he didn't think that there was anyone in the Israeli government who really believed that the U.S. really intends to withhold guarantees. "Israel's economy is pretty strong, and the threat wouldn't be appropriate," he said.

Under the Bush Administration, Israel received billions of dollars in guarantees, which are U.S.-backed loans with favorable interest rates. In 2003, the U.S. whittled down the guarantees after Israel built part of its separation barrier inside the West Bank rather than completely along it on the Israeli side.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office issued a statement in response to Mitchell's comments, pinning the blame for the negotiation logjam on the Palestinians.

"Everyone realizes that the Palestinian Authority refuses to renew peace talks, while Israel took significant steps to advance the process," the statement said.

In late November, Netanyahu announced a temporary construction freeze in West Bank settlements. The 10-month freeze does not apply to East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to establish a future capital.

Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in 1967. The Palestinians and the international community consider Israeli construction in both areas to be settlement activity.

The Palestinians so far have rebuffed U.S. pressure to abandon their demand for a total construction freeze in both areas. They also want talks to resume where they left off under Netanyahu's predecessor, Ehud Olmert, who proposed sharing Jerusalem and ceding wide swaths of the West Bank to a future Palestinian state.

Israel says it has no pre-conditions for talks and is willing to immediately discuss all outstanding issues. But Netanyahu has said repeatedly that Israel does not intend to share Jerusalem and historically he has opposed giving up all the West Bank land the Palestinians claim.

The Palestinians say such positions offer little common ground for talks to succeed.

On Friday, the Obama Administration laid out a major shift in its Mideast peace strategy, suggesting both sides move past this impasse by tackling defining borders for a Palestinian state and the status of Jerusalem.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that dealing with those matters first would eliminate Palestinian concerns about continued construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Palestinians' immediate response was to hold fast to their demand for a complete construction freeze: If Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas retreats now from his demand for a complete settlement freeze, that could further hurt his standing among Palestinians who are increasingly skeptical about peace efforts.

However, if the new U.S. strategy will include support for holding the talks based on 1967 borders, Abbas could present that as a major achievement.

Greater clarity is expected after Mitchell visits Israel and the Palestinian territories later this month. He plans to visit Paris and Brussels first to build support for the approach from European officials.

3) US general: We have contingency plan for Iran

General David Petraeus tells CNN US military ready for day diplomatic efforts against Iranian nuclear program fail, says Iranian facilities 'certainly can be bombed'


The United States has prepared detailed contingency plans for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, should negotiations between the Islamic Republic and the West fail, a top US general told CNN.

General David Petraeus said in an interview to be broadcast Sunday: "It would be almost literally irresponsible if CENTCOM were not to have been thinking about the various 'what ifs' and to make plans for a whole variety of different contingencies."

Islamic Republic's president says it won't back down 'one iota' in face of western pressure over its nuclear program. 'They think Iranians will fall on their knees over these things but they are mistaken,' he says


CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour asked Petraeus about rumors that Israel may attack Iran's nuclear facilities, but the general declined to comment about Israel's military capabilities.


When asked about reports that Iran had successfully strengthened its nuclear facilities, Petraeus said that while some of them were underground, they could still be bombed and significantly damaged.

"They certainly can be bombed," he said. "The level of effect would vary with who it is that carries it out, what ordnance they have, and what capability they can bring to bear."


The general added that he believes it will be some time before the US decided to execute its contingency plans, and that for the time being, diplomatic efforts will continue.


He said the American military does not have a time limit or a deadline, and that the contingency plans could be executed at any time.

'Strike could be destabilizing'

Last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that a strike on Iran could be "very, very destabilizing" and have unintended consequences for the Middle East, adding that diplomacy was crucial.


Mullen said he believed Tehran was "on a path that has strategic intent to develop nuclear weapons and have been for some time" – a charge Iran denies.


"I think that outcome is potentially a very, very destabilizing outcome… on the other hand, when asked about striking Iran, specifically, that also has a very, very destabilizing outcome," he said.


Mullen said he worried about "unintended consequences" of either scenario, adding "that part of the world could become much more unstable, which is a dangerous global outcome."

4)There's no penalty for sleeping on the job
By Wesley Pruden

If it's true, as Dr. Johnson famously told us it was, that the prospect of hanging focuses the mind in a wonderful way, maybe the prospect of facing angry voters sharpens a politician's instincts (if not necessarily his mind).


After first treating the Detroit panty bomber as if it were merely an amusing story ("an isolated incident") that an airline passenger could dine out on for a few days, President Obama is giving a good imitation now of a man getting a late education. Maybe the education will take. It's too soon to say. He said late Thursday that he won't fire anybody. "Ultimately, the buck stops with me. When the system fails, it's my responsibility."


Smooth talk is easy for Mr. Obama, and he often confuses words with deeds. He's taking responsibility for what happened aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on final approach over Detroit, but it's not clear what that means. He's not likely to fire himself (perhaps to spare us Joe Biden). So nobody pays a price for some serious sleeping on the job. Sleeping on the job is serious, but not that serious.


The president and his Democrats are closing ranks behind top national security officials who are begging to be thrown into the street with their briefcases and keys to the executive washroom. The solution they prescribe is to build the intelligence bureaucracies a little bigger and thicker, layering incompetence with impotence, giving a little relief to the intelligence minions "who have worked so hard." Some no doubt have, but where were the intelligence analysts who saw nothing suspicious when the panty bomber bought his one-way ticket to the U.S.A. with cash, leaving a subtropical city bound for icy Detroit with no luggage?





The State Department, warned by the terrorist's father that he had fallen in with evil companions and was up to no good, finally did its best work Thursday, revoking the visa of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. If he is released for more jihad, he won't be able to return to the United States without a new visa. This sounds like a bad joke, but it isn't. That's how the Foggy Bottom fudge factory works.


But it's not just the folks in Foggy Bottom. Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, decided not to cut his skiing vacation to return to work when he heard about the panty bomber's aborted attempt to blow up another airliner. "People have been grumbling that he didn't let a little terrorism interrupt his vacation," someone at the counterterrorism center told the New York Daily News. A spokesman for the center wouldn't say exactly when Mr. Leiter returned to work, but it was apparently several days later. The snow wasn't so good on the slopes, the hot buttered rum had curdled and cooled, and there was no longer any good reason to stay around.


Mr. Obama, who was said to have used "unusually blunt language" when he called in a group of government officials to scold them for what went wrong, disclosed that U.S. intelligence officials knew that al Qaeda in Yemen "aspired to attack the U.S. homeland." The intelligence "community" just "failed to connect the dots." In all fairness, maybe dots are hard to see in the snow.


Janet Napolitano was not on a ski slope, so we don't know whether she saw dots. She says the "system worked," and she may have been talking about the courageous Dutchman and the stewardesses who subdued and stripped the panty bomber. In Janet's "system," everyone gets to sit next to a flying Dutchman. Napolitano earlier had chided those who insist on calling the war on terror "the war on terror." But that's so early 21st century, so George W. Bush. She renamed terrorism "man-made disasters."


Mzz Napolitano, something of a man-made disaster herself, is naturally collecting a coterie of defenders inside the Beltway. But not everyone is falling in line. David Broder of The Washington Post, the dour, sober-sided "dean of the Beltway pundits," put his tongue in cheek to deliver a devastating satire of the lady's performance.


"It came as no surprise to anyone who knows her that [Mzz] Napolitano handled the incident and its aftermath with aplomb," he wrote. "In the years I have known her, she has managed every challenge … with the same calm command that she showed in this instance. If there is anyone in the administration who embodies President Obama's preference for quiet competence with 'no drama,' it is Janet Napolitano."


David Broder, of all people, aspiring to be Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh. Who knew?


Take note, Mr. President: When the Democrats lose David Broder, they're deep in man-made disaster.

5)Security Theater Now Playing at Your Airport
By Daniel Pipes


As hands are wrung in the aftermath of the near-tragedy on a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit, a conversation from London's Heathrow airport in 1986 comes to mind.

It consisted of an El Al security agent quizzing one Ann-Marie Doreen Murphy, a 32-year-old recent arrival in London from Sallynoggin, Ireland. While working as a chambermaid at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, Murphy met Nizar al-Hindawi, a far-leftist Palestinian who impregnated her. After instructing her to "get rid of the thing," he abruptly changed his tune and insisted on immediate marriage in "the Holy Land." He also insisted on their traveling separately.

Murphy, later described by the prosecutor as a "simple, unsophisticated Irish lass and a Catholic," accepted unquestioningly Hindawi's arrangements for her to fly to Israel on El Al on April 17. She also accepted a wheeled suitcase with, unbeknown to her, a false bottom containing nearly 2 kilograms of Semtex, a powerful plastic explosive, and she agreed to be coached by him to answer questions posed by airport security.

Murphy successfully passed through the standard Heathrow security inspection and reached the gate with her bag, where an El Al agent questioned her. As reconstructed by Neil C. Livingstone and David Halevy in Washingtonian magazine, he started by asking whether she had packed her bags herself. She replied in the negative. Then:

"What is the purpose of your trip to Israel?" Recalling Hindawi's instructions, Murphy answered, "For a vacation."

"Are you married, Miss Murphy?" "No."

"Traveling alone?" "Yes."

"Is this your first trip abroad?" "Yes."

"Do you have relatives in Israel?" "No."

"Are you going to meet someone in Israel?" "No.

"Has your vacation been planned for a long time?" "No."

"Where will you stay while you're in Israel?" "The Tel Aviv Hilton."

"How much money do you have with you?" "Fifty pounds." The Hilton at that time costing at least £70 a night, he asked:

"Do you have a credit card?" "Oh, yes," she replied, showing him an ID for cashing checks.

That did it, and the agent sent her bag for additional inspection, where the bombing apparatus was discovered.



Security at Ben-Gurion Airport in Israel.

Had El Al followed the usual Western security procedures, 375 lives would surely have been lost somewhere over Austria. The bombing plot came to light, in other words, through a non-technical intervention, relying on conversation, perception, common sense, and (yes) profiling. The agent focused on the passenger, not the weaponry. Israeli counterterrorism takes passengers' identities into account; accordingly, Arabs endure an especially tough inspection. "In Israel, security comes first," David Harris of the American Jewish Committee explains.

Obvious as this sounds, overconfidence, political correctness, and legal liability render such an approach impossible anywhere else in the West. In the United States, for example, one month after 9/11, the Department of Transportation issued guidelines forbidding its personnel from generalizing "about the propensity of members of any racial, ethnic, religious, or national origin group to engage in unlawful activity." (Wear a hijab, I semi-jokingly advise women wanting to avoid secondary screening at airport security.)

Worse yet, consider the panicky Mickey-Mouse, and embarrassing steps the U.S. Transportation Security Administration implemented hours after the Detroit bombing attempt: no crew announcements "concerning flight path or position over cities or landmarks," and disabling all passenger communications services. During a flight's final hour, passengers may not stand up, access carry-on baggage, nor "have any blankets, pillows, or personal belongings on the lap."

Some crews went yet further, keeping cabin lights on throughout the night while turning off the in-flight entertainment, prohibiting all electronic devices, and, during the final hour, requiring passengers to keep hands visible and neither eat nor drink. Things got so bad, the Associated Press reports, "A demand by one attendant that no one could read anything … elicited gasps of disbelief and howls of laughter."

Widely criticized for these Clouseau-like measures, TSA eventually decided to add "enhanced screening" for travelers passing through or originating from fourteen "countries of interest" – as though one's choice of departure airport indicates a propensity for suicide bombing.

The TSA engages in "security theater" – bumbling pretend-steps that treat all passengers equally rather than risk offending anyone by focusing, say, on religion. The alternative approach is Israelification, defined by Toronto's Star newspaper as "a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death."

Which do we want – theatrics or safety?

Mr. Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and Taube fellow at the Hoover Institution, has super-elite status at two airlines.

Jan. 6, 2010 update: I lacked space in the column to play out this ultimate scenario: What if a very large group of hijackers gets on a plane, enough of them so that with muscle alone – no knives, guns, or bombs – they overpower the passengers and crew? What if they threaten the pilots to strangle one person after another until the plane comes under their control? No amount of technology can prevent such a scenario; only scrutiny of who is getting aboard can do so.

And while there has been no such large group, "Those Fourteen Syrians on Northwest Airlines Flight #327" represented a possible step in that direction.

6)Captain Obvious Learns the Limits of Cool
By MAUREEN DOWD

Our president came down from the mountaintop.

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 certainty 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.

6a)The Label Factor: Is Obama a Wimp or a Warrior?
By HELENE COOPER


Like every Democratic president since John F. Kennedy, President Obama is battling the perception that he’s a wimp on national security.


It’s not just coming from Republicans (for example, Dick Cheney’s accusation that Mr. Obama is trying to pretend that the country isn’t at war). Now barbs are coming from the center too. This week’s Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative cover: Mr. Obama next to Jimmy Carter with — gasp — an “equals” sign in the middle. New York Times/CBS polling shows that public approval of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy dropped 9 points to 50 percent between last April and November. Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on the Daily Beast blog two weeks ago that Mr. Obama needs to toughen up with his adversaries. “He puts far too much store on being the smartest guy in the room,” Mr. Gelb wrote. “He’d do well to remember that Jimmy Carter also rang all the I.Q. bells.”

So soon? Here is a president who just ramped up the war in Afghanistan, sending an additional 30,000 American troops. He has stepped up drone strikes by unmanned Predators in Pakistan and provided intelligence and firepower for two airstrikes against Al Qaeda in Yemen that killed more than 60 militants. He has resisted the temptation to sign a new nuclear arms agreement with Russia that might not provide American inspectors with the level of verification detail that they want. He is moving toward the wide use of full body scans in American airports. On Thursday, in an oblique nod to the Cheney criticism, he even used the phrase “we are at war,” in describing the fight against Al Qaeda.

Of course, accusations that Democrats are genetically softer on threats to the Republic are nothing new. After World War II, Republicans mostly stopped attacking the Democrats as the party that had gotten America into two world wars, and began calling it soft on Communism. Roosevelt’s agreement to the postwar division of Europe at Yalta, followed by China’s fall in 1949 while Truman was president, spurred that on. John Kennedy managed to emerge from an early fiasco at the Bay of Pigs and achieve the counter-image of a cold war liberal, thanks to the Berlin and Cuban-missile crises; then Lyndon Johnson’s fear of being labeled “soft on Communism” helped him override his doubts about getting deeper into Vietnam. But after that, the ill-fated antiwar candidacy of George McGovern, followed by Jimmy Carter’s inability to rescue American hostages in Iran, sealed a stereotype of Democrats as, well, wimps.

And labels count, as a poll taken last August by the Pew Center for the People and the Press illustrates: When voters were asked which party could do a better job of dealing with terrorism, they expressed more confidence in Republicans than in Democrats, as they had consistently since 2002. The 2009 margin was 38 percent to 32 percent. But when asked which party could do a better job of making wise decisions about foreign policy, 44 percent chose the Democrats, 31 percent the Republicans.

Some experts say that the weakling label is more about this city than Mr. Obama — that every political cycle brings with it the opportunity for pundits and politicians to try to prove they were right all along. “I think the problem is much less Obama than the audience,” said George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This is about talk radio and punditry; these are the absolutes that the bloggers deal with: wimp or macho? This is the new caricature, but it doesn’t withstand any analysis.”

But labels can stick, as Mr. Carter himself found out so well, and as the Republicans also know from their experience parrying the opposite stereotype — of cowboy-style recklessness, first under Ronald Reagan and later under George W. Bush (whose own father, oddly, was said to have suffered from a “wimp factor”).

All of which raises the question of what, exactly, it is that Mr. Obama has to do by the end of the year to turn around the impression that Democrats are cream puffs on foreign policy.

For the White House, 2009 was a year of emphasizing a departure from the blunter foreign policy style of President Bush, of projecting that America could offer an unclenched fist (Iran), push the reset button (Russia) and proclaim that it was moving to a policy that focused not only on guns but also offered butter (Pakistan).

But now, 2010 “will be about achieving some results there,” said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress and a Democrat. “They’re going to need to demonstrate a set of tangible successes that’s not just a set of speeches.”

Those tangible successes include being able to show that the nice-guy act can yield real results.

Take Russia, for instance. Mr. Obama needs Russia’s agreement to impose stiffer United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran this year, to make worthwhile the 12 months he just spent courting President Dimitri Medvedev.

In 2009, Mr. Obama pledged a new relationship with Russia after several years during which the Bush administration and the Kremlin were at each other’s throats over everything from missile defense to Georgia. Mr. Obama removed the thorniest dispute between the two countries when he announced last September that he would scrap plans for missile defense system sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, a central irritant to Russia, in favor of smaller ship-based interceptors that might later be positioned on land in Europe. Russia welcomed the move, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin going so far as to call it “correct and brave.”

Now it’s time for some payback. The United States wants the Security Council to endorse tough new sanctions against Iran as part of the international effort to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Russia and China don’t like sanctions, and both have dragged their feet before.

So far, Mr. Obama has gotten Mr. Medvedev — but not China’s president, Hu Jintao — to say publicly that he might be willing to endorse new sanctions. But will Russia and China come through when the time arrives?

“The biggest vulnerability that he’s got is that he said all that stuff about engagement and the outstretched hand, that he looks naïve if he discovers that other people don’t reciprocate,” said Stephen Sestanovich, Clinton administration ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. But, he added: “The Chinese and the Russians are more likely to try to let him down easy, to smooth over the disagreement. They like the good relationship they’ve got now, and there’s no payoff for them in trying to humiliate him.”

And, speaking of Iran, this is the year when Mr. Obama must go from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde with that country, the experts say. Nobody thinks there’s much chance that the Iranian government will suddenly suspend its enrichment of uranium, as Mr. Obama would like. But Mr. Perkovich argues that Mr. Obama has done much to unhinge the government there, by giving the opposition in Iran more of a reason to view the United States with a kinder eye, thanks to Mr. Obama’s overtures over the past year. Still, since the president can’t depend on the Iranian opposition toppling the government, 2010 is the year he must show he is standing tough to try to contain Iran. Which means harsher Security Council sanctions.

Then there’s terrorism. Mr. Obama will also have to demonstrate some tangible action there, the experts say, to dispel the notion put forward by the Republicans that his plans to shut down the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, makes Americans less safe. The Christmas Day attempted plane attack over Detroit failed in many ways, but it succeeded in doing one thing: reintroducing the issue of terrorism into the American psyche. Now, Mr. Obama is under pressure to show that he considers fighting terrorism to be a priority.

The problem though, is that many of the steps he can take against terrorism — like intelligence co-operation, drone strikes and covert actions — are, by their very nature, often invisible. “He needs visible victories there, like hits on Al Qaeda leaders, so no one is able to put together a narrative that says he’s weak,” said David J. Rothkopf, a Clinton administration official and author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.”

For Mr. Obama, that may also mean talking tough more often, Mr. Rothkopf said. “If you’re going to be president of the United States in the early part of the 21st century, you’re going to have to look like you’re tough on terror.”

7)Stop Blaming the CIA
by Marc Thiessen

The president is wrong to scapegoat the intelligence agency for failing to connect the dots on the Christmas bomber. Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen on why Obama’s early moves tied our hands in the war on terror.

The report released by the White House Thursday into the failure to stop al Qaeda’s attempt to blow up a passenger plane over Detroit found a number of mistakes were made—including the misspelling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s name and the failure to put him on the no-fly list. But the ultimate failure was much larger. According to the New York Times, “The report concluded that the government’s counterterrorism operations had been caught off guard by the sophistication and strength of a Qaeda cell in Yemen, where officials say the plot against the United States originated.”

President Obama laid blame for this failure on the agency he has put under siege since his second day in office: the CIA. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” he declared this week, “it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we had …. That’s not acceptable and I will not tolerate it.” But the President’s chief counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, told a different story, acknowledging that we did not, in fact, have all the intelligence we needed: “We did have the information throughout the course of the summer and fall about … plans to carry out attacks,” Brennan said. “We had snippets of information …. We may have had a partial name. We might have had an indication of a Nigerian. But there was nothing that brought it all together.”

The ability to detain and question senior terrorist operatives is not a luxury we can do without; it is essential to preventing new attacks on our country.

The question is: why did we have nothing that brought all the “snippets” of information together? Because within 48 hours after taking office, President Obama eliminated the only tool that would allow the intelligence community to do so: the CIA program to interrogate senior terrorist leaders. Thanks to Obama, America no longer have the capability to detain and question the only individuals who know how the information fits together—the terrorists themselves.

In the age of terror, our enemies do not have large armies or flotillas of warships that can be observed by spies or tracked by satellites. Instead, the terrorists conspire in secret, hide among civilians, and attack us from within. Their plans to kill innocent men, women, and children are known only to a handful of cruel men.

This means there are essentially three ways to gain information about terrorist attacks:

The first, and hardest, is to penetrate the enemy. This can be done, but it is no easy task. Al Qaeda is a small, secretive network of Arab extremists that is extremely suspicious of outsiders. And we saw this week just how difficult it is to penetrate their ranks. The terrorist who blew up a CIA base in Afghanistan—killing seven operatives—turns out to have been a double agent, a trusted source who was really working for the enemy.

The second method is “signals intelligence”—using advanced technology to intercept and monitor the enemy’s electronic communications. Signals intelligence has been essential to the fight against terror, but it has inherent limitations. When intelligence officials monitor terrorist communications, they are passive listeners to the conversations of others. They cannot ask questions, probe for additional information, or sometimes even identify voices or email addresses in intercepted communications. Moreover, the terrorists know they are being monitored, so they are careful to speak codes that are difficult to break without inside information.

This leaves only one other human intelligence tool: interrogation. The interrogation of senior terrorist leaders has distinct advantages over other forms human intelligence. It allows our intelligence professionals to ask the terrorists direct questions. Because terrorists are held in secret and cut off from the outside world, CIA officials can expose sensitive intelligence to them during questioning without fear it will get back to terrorists at large. CIA officials can use information gained from one detainee to question other detainees—and then go back and confront the first detainee with what they learned. Captured terrorists can also help the CIA verify whether the sources we recruit inside al Qaeda are trustworthy, and providing reliable information. They can identify voices in phone calls and email addresses, and decipher enemy codes that would otherwise remain a mystery. No other tool provides our intelligence community with this kind of dynamic flexibility.

Moreover, while signals intelligence or sources can give us the “snippets of information” Brennan says we had about the Detroit attack, only the interrogation of captured terrorists can give us the full picture we were lacking in this case—the information needed to prevent attacks. As former CIA Director Mike Hayden explained in an interview for my book, Courting Disaster, “Intelligence is like putting a puzzle together and never being allowed to see the picture on the cover of the box. The people who got into the CIA program were, by definition, senior leaders. They had seen the cover. And so, they were valued for more than the fact that they knew data. They knew what the final picture roughly looked like.”

In other words, a captured terrorist can do more than give the CIA additional pieces of the puzzle; he can tell the agency how all the various pieces of the puzzle fit together. He can show us the cover of the box.

According to recently declassified CIA documents, after 9/11, there were two terrorist networks at large that were planning new attacks on America: the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed network that planned the 9/11 attacks (and had set in motion plots to fly planes in to Heathrow airport and blow up the U.S. consulate in Karachi), and the “Hambali network” which KSM had tasked to hijack an airplane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles. We knew virtually nothing about these two networks or their plans—until KSM and other senior al Qaeda leaders provided information under CIA questioning that allowed us to dismantle them. (I can already hear the howls of protest from liberals who argue that no useful intel ever came from an enhanced interrogation technique. But they apparently never bothered to read the evidence to the contrary).

Now, eight years after 9/11, we face a new terror network—a mysterious branch of al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula that almost succeeded in bringing down a commercial airliner over one of America’s largest cities. By the Obama administration’s own admission, we know very little about this network or its plans to attack America. The reason is because we are not trying to capture the leaders of this network alive, and bring them in for interrogation so they can show us to cover of the box.

The ability to detain and question senior terrorist operatives is not a luxury we can do without; it is essential to preventing new attacks on our country. This is something John Brennan once understood. Asked in a 2007 interview if enhanced interrogation techniques were necessary to keep America safe, Brennan replied: “Would the U.S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities? I would say yes.”

On his second day in office Obama eliminated this capability—and this, in his own advisor’s assessment, handicapped our country in the fight against terror. Indeed, President Obama has admitted as much. Speaking at the CIA soon after shutting down the CIA interrogation program, Obama told officials, “I’m sure that sometimes it seems as if that means we’re operating with one hand tied behind our back … So yes, you’ve got a harder job. And so do I. And that’s okay.”

It’s not okay, Mr. President. It almost caused another attack.

Marc Thiessen’s new book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack, will be published by Regnery on January
18th.

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