What do you even say?
Blair memo muffs, fixes flight no.
A memo Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair issued tonight promising to “take a fresh and penetrating look at strengthening both human and technical performance” in the wake of the attempted terrorist bombing on Christmas Day misstated the number of the flight where the attempt took place.
“That Mr. Abdulmutallab boarded Northwest Flight 153 for Detroit was a failure of the counterterrorism system,” Blair wrote in a message to “employees of the United States Intelligence Community” which was e-mailed to reporters and posted for a time on the DNI’s website. The correct number for the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight was 253.It’s just a typo, and in fact, the DNI fixed it on its webpage shortly after sending reporters the statement. But it’s an awkward slip-up on the same day the White House admitted that a typo prevented the State Department from realizing it had granted a visa to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. (Someone spelled his name wrong during a search.)
The new report also described “a series of human errors” which affected the distribution of intelligence regarding AbdulMutallab or the plot in which he allegedly took part.
Full text of the message, as originally posted and distributed to the press, is after the jump. The corrected versions (Here’s the corrected text of the message and PDF file on the DNI website.)
Obama is blaming “a failure to connect the dots” for the successful terrorist penetration of our air security. It makes it sound like an oopsy in a children’s board game. But his own senior people can’t even connect their own damn typos.
Now we find out that this terrorist AbdulMutallab actually got a VISA because we can’t count on our own State Department to type a freaking name correctly? And there are bound to be a lot more little faux pas like this one: do you know how many letters there are in a typical Islamic jihadist’s name?
It’s just ever so much easier to focus on the shampoo bottle of the 96-year old lady from Iowa. Let’s keep concentrating on doing that, instead.
The Obama State Department is handing out visas to al Qaeda terrorists out of Yemen because it’s become too incompetent to operate under the leadership of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. That’s a little more than a damned DOT.
I can understand the sentiments of people who say Obama can’t fire Janet Napolitano – who “is so far out of her depth that it can’t be measured with Newtonian metrics” – no matter how dangerously incompetent she is. One commenter to a pajamasmedia article put it this way:
“Why should Obama fire Janet Napolitano? She is simply carrying out his prime directive to weaken America in every way possible.”
And he’s got a point about “Ms. Man-Caused Disaster.” Janet Napolitano isn’t merely a dangerously incompetent clown; she’s Barack Obama’s handpicked dangerously incompetent clown. And, I mean, we should no more insist on firing Janet Napolitano for her “system worked” incompetence than we should fire Obama for his “isolated extremist” incompetence.
Do these people drive to work wearing their clown suits, or do they wait until after they get to their offices to put them on?
Start Thinking Right 