by Nathan S. –

Ever since the Holy Spirit descended on Obama’s shoulders inauguration last year, this country has witnessed several unobstructed attempts at disrupting the engine of our societal peace.  Each time the administration has failed to either proactively engage such attempts in the homeland or glean anything of worth in hindsight.

Twelve died and thirty-one were wounded in the Ft. Hood massacre after the shooter – Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan – cried out “Allahu Akbar!”  Allowing for the fact that a lone player is extremely difficult to anticipate, it still took three months for Janet Napolitano to finally realize it was terrorism.  Last Christmas Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab accidentally lit his genitals on fire instead of blowing up his intended target of 300 passengers aboard an international flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.  In response Eric Holder interrupted the Al Qaeda foreigner’s interrogation so he could be Mirandized and obtain a lawyer.  And now, with the Times Square incident, Faisal Shahzad has been taken into custody along with a few others in Pakistan (where Shahzad learned how to make explosives in a terror training camp) several days after he was able to park a bomb in the middle of downtown New York.

Both Abdulmutallab and Shahzad were on “no fly” lists yet they managed to slip right through DHS’s fingers giving one full access to his intended targets and the other a means to escape.  Apparently, in 2010, the average American citizen has a better chance of stopping a terrorist attack than Homeland Security.

All of these events should be seen in the greater context of a toothless response to terror that includes changing the phrase “war on terror” to the ambiguous “overseas contingency operation” and the word “terrorism” itself to a child-like euphemism of “man-made disaster”.  What’s next, changing “suicide bomber” to “he make boom boom”?

Even with Bush’s pathetic stance on securing the border, America could rely on an offensive approach that ensured no new attacks since 9/11; an accomplishment that is apparently too difficult for Obama to emulate.  This president should be tweeting “Thank you” notes to God that the Christmas Day and Times Square bombs didn’t go off because, if they had, his ridiculous domestic agenda would have been lost by the wayside to a renewed interest in the fragility of national security.

Maybe then we’d be questioning Obama’s lackluster attitude towards key provisions in the Patriot Act whose prescience has been usurped by Health Care.  Or perhaps we’d take another look at the administration’s decision to disrupt the C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques while creating a new bureaucracy out of thin air to question terrorists; all of which is simply throwing molasses on the already squeaking cogs of the counter-terrorism effort.

The success of Bush’s efforts in protecting the homeland rested on a supposition he offered to West Point in 2002:

“We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best.  We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systematically break them.  If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”

Obama and his team should be adopting the Bush playbook if they ever wish to have the upper hand on potential terror threats inside our borders.

© 2010, Nathan S.. All rights reserved.

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