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Intelligence Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

carpro

carpro

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704065404574636130361837754.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Intelligence Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

President Obama doesn't need an investigation to figure out how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab got on a Detroit-bound plane.

President Obama promises to investigate what went wrong, but there's no big mystery. He should simply review testimony put in the public record in early December, before the Christmas Day incident. Sen. Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security Committee heard an explanation of how U.S. intelligence agencies decide when to put suspected terrorists on a watch list or a no-fly list.

Timothy Healy, the head of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, explained the unit's "reasonable suspicion" standard like this:
"Reasonable suspicion requires 'articulable' facts which, taken together with rational inferences, reasonably warrant a determination that an individual is known or suspected to be or has been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to, terrorism and terrorist activities, and is based on the totality of the circumstances. Mere guesses or inarticulate 'hunches' are not enough to constitute reasonable suspicion."

If this sounds like legalistic language, it is. Indeed, a quick Web search was a reminder that this language is adapted from Terry v. Ohio, a landmark Supreme Court case in 1968 that determined when Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches allows the police to frisk civilians or conduct traffic stops. In other words, foreign terrorists have somehow now been granted Fourth Amendment reasonableness rights that courts intended to protect Americans being searched by the local police. Thus was Abdulmutallab allowed on the airplane with his explosives.
 
carpro

carpro

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In other words, Obama only has to look in the mirror to discover the reason a terrorist got past security to board a plane.
 
D

Dragoon68

Active Member
They just don't want to concentrate on the radical Islamic threat. It's so much easier - and more fun - to control the masses of docile travelers who get subjected to ridiculous and obviously non-beneficial "security" procedures.

Obama's response will be more rules that will impact those who are not a threat.

Meanwhile, does anyone need a copy of TSA's security manual? It was posted on the Internet several weeks ago!
 
poncho

poncho

Well-Known Member
I can think of only a couple reasons why this guy might have been able to "slip" through security.

1. He was allowed too. We've become driven by fear. We'll give the government and by extension it's many contractors anything they demand in order to keep us safe. All they ever want is more money, more power and more control which we hand over without question whenever we receive a good scare from an outside threat.

These types of threats always benefit the government and it's contractors at the expense of the people. We get more debt and government control over our lives, the military industrial complex gets bigger paydays and the government gets more power and control. These are happy days indeed for the government and it's contractors aka Govcorp Inc. for those of you who can correctly identify fascism when you see it.

Govcorp Inc. couldn't have hired any PR firm to do a better job of drumming up support for it's lagging "war on terror" and opening up yet another front than this guy did just by boarding a plane and threatening people.


2. Our ever expanding militarized surveillance state simply has too much worthless information to sort through. The good old boys charged with keeping us safe are buried in information and waste most of their time and energy (not to mention our tax dollars) chasing down leads to nowhere.

This is true for two reasons: (1) eliminating strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism; and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots. As Rep. Holt put it when arguing against the obliteration of FISA safeguards and massive expansion of warrantless eavesdropping power which a bipartisan Congress effectuated last year:
It has been demonstrated that when officials must establish before a court that they have reason to intercept communications -- that is, that they know what they are doing -- we get better intelligence than through indiscriminate collection and fishing expeditions.
​
The failure of the U.S. Government to detect the fairly glaring Northwest Airlines Christmas plot -- despite years and years of constant expansions of Surveillance State powers -- illustrates this dynamic perfectly. As President Obama said yesterday, the Government -- just as was true for 9/11 -- had gathered more than enough information to have detected this plot, or at least to have kept Abdulmutallab off airplanes and out of the country. Yet our intelligence agencies -- just as was true for 9/11 -- failed to understand what they had in their possession. Why is that? Because they had too much to process, including too much data wholly unrelated to Terrorism. In other words, our panic-driven need to vest the Government with more and more surveillance power every time we get scared again by Terrorists -- in the name of keeping us safe -- has exactly the opposite effect. Numerous pieces of evidence prove that.

SOURCE
 
poncho

poncho

Well-Known Member
Johnv said:
I'll give you a nickel if you can say that 10 times fast.
Click to expand...

A nickel? Don't be such a cheapskate John. At least try and make it worth the man's while by bumping it up to a severly devalued reserve note.
 
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poncho

poncho

Well-Known Member
Johnv said:
Of course I can dicate to them. They won't hear it, but hey, I can dictate. :wavey:
Click to expand...

You're posting on an internet forum John, they probably read it as you were typing it. :smilewinkgrin:
 
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carpro

carpro

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It's funny how these threads just kinda take off in a direction that has nothing to do with the topic.. Here we are on page 2 with hardly a comment concerning the OP. I must admit that I succumbed to the temptation as well.

With that in mind, does anyone have a comment concerning the OP? I see this as a fundamental change in the approach to handle terrorism. I see it as dangerous and shortsighted and , ultimately, the reason the underwear bomber escaped the notice of our security apparatus.

Who is responsible for this? I believe it is none other than the president, himself. Any comments?

If not, I'll ask a moderator to close the thread.
 
Crabtownboy

Crabtownboy

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carpro said:
Who is responsible for this? I believe it is none other than the president, himself. Any comments?
Click to expand...

Obama is as responsible for the intelligence slip ups as was Bush for those during his term in office.

Perhaps we had too much intelligence ... too many dots collected to see the picture clearly.

Have you ever walked up close to a Monet painting in a museum? Up close the painting does not look like much. Back off and it all pieces together into a beautiful painting. There are other artists whose paintings exhibit this to a much greater degree than Monet. Take a look at Paul Signac's paintings.
 
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