Obama's failure responsible for underwear bomber attack

Judith Apter Klinghoffer:

Barack Obama is right. The ability of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a plane to Detroit represents a "catastrophic" failure. But he is also wrong. The system did not fail. He did. He sent signals which led the people working in the system to fail. These people no longer worked for an anti terrorist warier called George W. Bush but a cool, imperturbable Barack Obama whose primary enemy was "over reaction." This is the conclusion I reached reading that the warning received in Nigeria was not buried in Nigeria. The opposite is true. It triggered a multi-agency meeting, the kind of meeting designed to insure that the dots are connected. WSJ reports:

. . . the father of Mr. Abdulmutallab met with the Central Intelligence Agency at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, Nov. 19, and told of his son's likely radicalization, U.S. officials say. That led to a broader gathering of agencies the next day, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State Department, in which the information was shared, a U.S. official said.

The speed with which the meeting was organized bodes well for the system. Those present represented agency which were already in possession of bits of information which when pulled together should have enabled them to act precipitously.

So why didn't they? Because in this administration bureaucrats came to believe that acting was more dangerous to their careers than not acting. The Obama administration message was that the War on Terror was over. 9/11 was an aberration and so was the new legal structure built in its aftermath. Normalcy was not fought but courted....

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There is more.

Her quotes from Sec. Chertoff seem especially relevant. The more we find out about what we knew, the stranger the failure to act looks.