I hoped I would find a more or less complete assemblage of all the attempted terror attacks on U.S. soil that we’ve experienced since Obama came to office promising to end terrorism with his sheer exalted wonderfulness.
It wasn’t easy. List like this one are far and few between. I had to go back and stumble across a few names based on some attacks I remembered, and start entering search terms.
The media have clearly dropped the ball in keeping track of Obama’s “success” in dealing with this very real threat.
Barack Obama refused to even use the word “terrorism,” instead calling terrorist attacks “man-caused disasters.” Whereas George Bush took terrorism seriously and went to war to take on those who would kill Americans wherever they were, Barack Obama decided that there was no war, and renamed it an “overseas contingency operation.”
I provided all the html links, and added a couple of comments in brackets.
Man-Caused Disasters Remained A Concern In 2009
Posted by: RFW @ 2:00 pm
Despite the hope and change brought along with a new administration, Americans discovered in 2009 that the threat of terrorism remained. There were several near disasters this last year along with a couple of actual man-caused disasters. While creating the following list I was surprised by the large number of arrests on American soil. I assume my surprise is due to the fact that the media generally forgets about these incidents within a very short period of time and does not make any attempt to report them as another piece of a larger puzzle.
– On May 20, 2009 three U.S. citizens (James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams) and one Haitian (Laguerre Payen) from Newburgh, New York were arrested in a plot to blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale community of the Bronx. The men allegedly placed bombs wired to cell phones in three separate cars outside the Riverdale Temple and nearby Riverdale Jewish Center. It was also alleged that they planed to shoot down military planes operating out of Stewart Air National Guard Base. Both the car bombs and the missiles were actually fakes given to the plotters with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. [It is also important to note that all three were black converts to Islam radicalized while in the prison system].
– On June 1, 2009 an assailant opened fire on a United States military recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, an American who had converted to Islam, was accused of killing Private William Long. According to law enforcement officials, Muhammad had conducted research on other targets, including military sites, government facilities and Jewish institutions throughout the country. [Note: a successful terror attack].
– On July 27, 2009 seven men were arrested in North Carolina and charged with plotting to wage “violent jihad” outside the United States. Daniel Patrick Boyd, who authorities allege was the ringleader of a group of men that trained in North Carolina, was later also charged with planning to attack the U.S. Marine base at Quantico, Virginia. Boyd and another man, Hysen Sherifi, were charged with conspiring to murder U.S. military personnel.
– On September 14, 2009 Law enforcement agents raided residences in New York City and later that day briefed members of Congress about their terrorism investigation. Authorities found 14 new black backpacks during the raids fueling concern the plan may have been to use them with suicide bombs. Najibullah Zazi and his father Mohammed Zazi were arrested five days later at Najibullah’s home in Denver, Colorado. FBI agents also arrested Ahmad Wais Afzali in New York. Najibullah Zazi, linked by authorities to al Qaeda, was charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.
– On September 23, 2009 Michael Finton, a 29-year-old convert to Islam who went by the name Talib Islam, was arrested in an alleged plot to blow up a federal building in Illinois. Finton drove a van containing what he thought was explosive material and parked it directly in front of the northwest corner of the Paul Findley Federal Building, a courthouse in Illinois. He attempted to detonate it remotely but the explosive was actually harmless, supplied to Islam by the FBI.
– On September 24, 2009 Hosam Maher Husein Smadi was arrested after he placed and attempted to detonate what he believed to be a car bomb in the garage of the 60-story Fountain Place office tower in Dallas. The fake explosive was given to him by an undercover FBI agent.
– On October 21, 2009 Tarek Mehanna, a Boston area man who lived with his parents and wrote a blog about Islam, was arrested for conspiring to become a jihadist and kill Americans. His alleged plots – all failed – included the assassination of prominent politicians, attacking US troops in Iraq and shooting randomly in a unidentified shopping mall.
– On November 5, 2009 a gunman killed 14 people (including one unborn baby) and wounded 30 others at the Fort Hood military base located near Killeen, Texas. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the only suspect in the crime, was radicalized by Muslim ideology. A muslim cleric said Hasan asked him in a December 2008 e-mail “whether killing American soldiers and officers is lawful or not” under Islamic law. [There’s your second successful terrorist attack].
– On December 25, 2009 a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to detonate the explosive PETN on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. An apparent malfunction in the device and the quick reaction of passengers saved the airplane and 278 lives on board. After being taken into custody, Abdulmutallab told authorities he had been directed by al-Qaeda.
If the media were looking for a theme, as they always do this time of year, 2009 could be called the “Year of the Home Grown Terrorist” as six of those arrested (James Cromitie, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, Daniel Patrick Boyd, Michael Finton, Tarek Mehanna, and Nidal Malik Hasan) were born right here in the United States.
When George Bush took office, there was absolutely no program in place to keep America safe. There were dozens of al Qaeda terrorist attacks against US targets, and Clinton did nothing nothing. The USS Cole was attacked by al Qaeda in Yemen in October 2000 during the waning days of the Clinton administration, with 17 American sailors killed, and Clinton swept it under the rug to create the illusion of a “clean slate.”
And George Bush, naively “looking forward, not backward,” attitude, failed to do anything to change our lack of protection under that terrible day seven months into his presidency.
Bush woke up fast. And with fury and determination unlike anything this country has seen since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the Bush administration devised a successful system to keep this country safe.
Barack Obama, taking incredibly foolish attitude that terrorism was merely a crime that he could stop with what amounted to a personality cult based on his own wonderfulness, systematically dismantled many of the Bush protections even as he apologized for America’s efforts to keep its citizens safe.
One of the most important things Bush did was to dismantle the wall that the Clinton administration erected preventing the CIA and the FBI from communicating with one another. Liberals want to maintain that the Clinton policy did not change the law, but merely clarified it. But the fact remains that the Clinton administration strengthened the communications barrier when he should have been encouraging intelligence-sharing between our security agencies.
We had a wall separating intelligence agencies into separate and disconnected fiefdoms prior to 9/11.
From the LA Times, April 14, 2004:
WASHINGTON — The scapegoat emerging from the Sept. 11 commission inquiry isn’t an elected official or agency but an obscure government policy that came to be known as “the wall.”
On Tuesday, as FBI, CIA and Justice Department officials continued to point the finger of blame at one another, they all seemed to agree that the wall was the overarching villain. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, for one, described it as “the single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11.”
Bush took great measures to tear down that wall.
To Obama’s great discredit, he picked Clinton Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder to become his Attorney General, after almost selecting Jamie Gorelick – Clinton’s General Counsel – for the post. And both men were at the very top of the food chain in strengthening the wall between the FBI and the CIA.
In other words, Obama decided to surround himself with the men who – out of liberal notions antagonistic to a strong intelligence community – built/strengthened the wall.
Obama selected Leon Panetta, another Clinton political hack, and a man who had absolutely no intelligence experience to qualify for leadership, to run the CIA. And then he selected Janet Napolitano, again an unqualified selection with absolutely no intelligence experience whatsoever, to run Homeland Security.
Obama made political loyalty, rather than experience or ability, his criteria for choosing the officials most responsible for keeping this country safe. And from the very start of his administration, he has politicized intelligence. They have taken nothing but a demagogic politicized (and incompetent) approach since. And we are beginning to see the risks with national security these people are willing to take to demagogically blame everyone but themselves for their failures:
The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. Other administration sources also say a flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama’s decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a “catastrophic” failure on Christmas Day.
“This White House doesn’t view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it’s a political issue,” says the White House source. “That’s why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue.”
After Obama appointed Eric Holder to be Attorney General, the man who pardoned terrorists for Bill Clinton went right to work attacking the CIA who had helped catch those terrorists in the first place. Democrats and the Obama administration repeatedly demonized the CIA and just as repeatedly threatened to criminalize their efforts to keep us safe.
Thanks to Obama’s demagoguery, the morale of the agency that is essential to our protection is depressed, sullen, and enraged:
[T]he CIA better change their mission to “CYA,” because our government is not going to stand behind you.”
Those concerns were echoed by a retired undercover operative who still works under contract for the agency (and asked to remain anonymous when discussing internal agency politics). Clandestine Service officers are both demoralized and angry at Obama’s decisions to release the memos and ban future agency use of aggressive interrogation tactics, the former operative said. “It embarrasses our families. You just can’t keep hitting us. Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.” The official added that “a lot of offense was taken” among some Clandestine Service veterans when Obama declared that the interrogation practices the agency employed under Bush were wrong, even though the new Administration would not prosecute operatives for carrying them out.
Did you hear that? “Sooner or later we’re going to stop going out and working.” That’s Obama’s “change” for you: demonizing and even criminalizing the people who kept us safe. Forcing them to protect themselves rather than take risks protecting the country.
And you wonder why Obama’s national security is falling apart now.
Obama made waterboarding the hallmark of his campaing to demonize Bush. Now “58% of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day,” and just 30% take Obama’s side and oppose the use of such techniques.
Americans were stupid to join with Obama and oppose waterboarding a year ago. But Obama is far more stupid in his ideological commitment to prevent America from protecting itself.
The use of waterboarding led to the breakthroughs in intelligence that allowed us to dismantle al Qaeda.
Four former CIA directors loudly objected to Obama’s release of CIA memos. Among other things, the release of those memos – again, for purely partisan political reasons – enabled al Qaeda to know exactly what US interrogators would and would not do and prepare for our new limited and hamstrung techniques.
Now we’re left with, “Tell us what you know, or we’re give you a polite but firmly-worded scolding.”
And we wonder why our national security is breaking down.
We can see Obama’s weakness and incompetence everywhere we turn. Obama has officially lost TWICE AS MANY American soldiers in Afghanistan as Bush did in 2008. And this after months of useless dithering that ultimately assured our enemies that we weren’t going to have the fortitude to fight the good fight over the long haul.
Just the other day, eight CIA officers were killed by a suicide bomber inside the safety of a US military base in Afghanistan in yet another example of Obama’s naive “terrorists can be our friends” policy. They were so busy trying to get the terrorist to change sides and love Big Brother Obama and so afraid of being “politically correct” or “profiling” that they didn’t dare search him.
You might not see this pathetic episode as a microcosm for Obama’s entire failed foreign policy and national security strategy, but you certainly can’t maintain the assertion that what he’s doing is working.
I started out providing a list of terrorists and attempted and successful terrorist attacks.
We could add Iran to that list. Because we’re certainly going to see Iran and Iranian-trained terrorists rearing their ugly heads due to Obama’s weakness soon. Every single day, with every new in-your-face step forward in their nuclear weapons program, amounts to a new terrorist attack upon the United States and Israel. For what it’s worth, I have been predicting that Iran would obtain nuclear weapons under a Democrat presidency since May of 2008.
When Iran gets its nukes and the ballistic missiles to deliver them (and they are very close to both goals), the world will become a different place. They don’t have to launch atomic Armageddon to use their nuclear weapons; all they have to do is block the Strait of Hormuz and drive up oil prices tenfold, or send out a wave of international terror attacks. Will we go to war with them, knowing that if we do they will destroy several of our cities and kill millions of our people?
In other words, we haven’t even BEGUN to see the fruit of Obama’s failures in his “man-caused disasters.”
Start Thinking Right 