We can rest easier now because we are all much safer with The Three Stooges in charge.
LARRY, MO, AND CURLY
By Monica Crowley
politicalmavens.com
December 21, 2010
It’s Christmastime, which is a time for joy and celebration—and for stepped up Islamic terror plots against the United States. Last Christmas Day, a Nigerian Muslim tried to detonate an explosive in his skivvies onboard an aircraft that would have rained down 300 dead bodies over Detroit. Terrorist chatter always increases this time of year. Everybody knows it.
Except, apparently, the folks in charge of counterterrorism.
It was bad enough when Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was asked this week what the DHS was doing to keep us safe this holiday season, and she replied that they were hard at work “24/7, 364 days a year.” Perhaps she was absent from school the day they taught how many days there are in a year.
But then, it got worse. Early yesterday morning, British authorities arrested 12 terror suspects in London on suspicion that they were in the final planning stages of a large-scale attack. Napolitano, White House Counterterrorism Chief John Brennan, and the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sat down with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, who asked specifically about the British arrests. Clapper—the head of national intelligence—had no idea what she was talking about it. She asked for his reaction to the arrests, and all we heard were crickets. See it here:
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/national-security-leaders-discuss-ongoing-terror-janet-napolitano-dhs-homeland-politics-12453917
Crickets and tumbleweeds from one of the top people responsible for keeping us safe. This is an outrageous lapse. By the time he did the interview with Sawyer, news of the arrests had rocketed around the world a gazillion times. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri certainly knew about them. But our DNI did not? If this had been a Republican DNI, there would be screams of “incompetence” followed by howling demands for his resignation. And rightly so.
Clapper needs to offer a better explanation than he has given so far (that he was otherwise engaged over North Korea). And the Commander in Chief had better reassure us himself over the intelligence and security measures his administration is taking, because his top people are clearly nincompoops.
This is life and death. There is no time for excuses or room for error.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jamie Smith, spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, subsequently excused Clapper’s ignorance by saying that “Director Clapper had not yet been briefed on the arrests in the United Kingdom at the time of this interview taping.” Clapper, she explained, had been “working throughout the day on important intelligence matters, including monitoring military and political developments on the Korean peninsula, providing answers to questions concerning the ratification of the START nuclear treaty and other classified issues.”
What a crock of shit! Obviously, Clapper is not the one that can turn the lights on and off.
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