Bloodthirsty Liberal

While President Obama was taking his victory lap a year after SEAL Team 6 greased OBL, declaring Al Qaeda as defunct as Gimbels, Al Qaeda begged to differ:

He could have breezed through security at any airport.

A terrorist wearing the latest underwear bomb would not have been caught by the TSA’s most conscientious human screeners or its highest-tech fullbody scanners, experts told The Post yesterday. But the country ducked a disaster by employing an age-old weapon: a double agent.

With the help of American allies in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the secret agent inserted himself into the terrorists’ secret inner circle, and became so trusted, the thugs accepted his offer to board a US-bound plane wearing the bomb.

Instead, the agent turned it over to the United States.

But experts said that as far as future suicide bomb attempts are concerned, current technology is not good enough to find nonmetallic explosive devices like the newest underwear bomb — despite Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s assurance that there was a “high likelihood’’ the bomber would have been stopped.
One top law-enforcement official insisted, “They would not have gotten him.”

This is one of those occasions when US security can proclaim a victory. Usually, it’s only the failures that make the news.

Which makes you wonder:

Federal investigators are conducting a probe into who leaked information about an al-Qaida plot in which an explosive device was to have been detonated on a U.S.-bound airline flight, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity about the leak investigation, which is just getting under way.

An anonymous official leaked information about a leak investigation? Typical.

The federal investigation is the latest move in an aggressive campaign by the Obama administration to crack down on leaks, even as it has supported proposed legislation that would shield reporters from having to identify their sources. The administration has already brought at least six criminal cases against people for discussing government secrets with reporters, more than under any previous presidency.

…

A spokesman for the AP, Paul Colford, said in a statement that the news organization “acted carefully and with extreme deliberation in its reporting on the underwear bomb plot and its subsequent decision to publish.”

“As the AP has reported, we distributed our exclusive report on the underwear bomb only after officials assured us — on Monday — that their security concerns had been satisfied and we learned that the White House would announce the news the next day,” Colford said.

I’ve got an angle for the FBI to investigate. Given Team Obama’s penchant for boasting (you would have thought Obama himself had caught Osama, with nothing but a lariat and a Swiss Army knife), maybe they leaked the news. They announced it publicly the next day anyway, and it was a national security victory—but as was also true of the OBL raid, premature jubilation can be an embarrassing problem.

This is a national security problem.

- Aggie

I think I’d choose the x-ray machine over the pat-down:

A TSA screener was arrested at JFK Airport for hurling a cup of hot coffee at an American Airlines pilot who told her and some colleagues to tone down a profanity- laced conversation in a terminal, sources said yesterday.

The dust-up occurred at about 5 a.m. on March 28, when airman Steven Trivett, 54, who was off-duty, was exiting Terminal 8 and overheard the banter, according to Port Authority police sources.

Trivett, of Butler, Tenn., told them they should “conduct themselves more professionally in uniform and not use profanity or the n-word,” a source explained.

One screener told him to “mind his own business” and cursed him out.

Trivett then identified himself as a “TSA officer” who is an armed pilot.

When he tried to grab at the ID tags of screener Lateisha El, 30, she pushed him and tossed a “full cup” of hot coffee on him, police say.

Trivett was not seriously injured. El, of Brooklyn’s East New York, was given a desk-appearance ticket on harassment and misdemeanor-assault charges.

Imagine being so offended by Lateisha’s language that you said something, and you were just a civilian? You’d be on the next flight to Guantanamo.

And Democrats want government to handle our health care?

We ‘ad the midnight munchies, and we wanted to order two Bacon, Beef ‘n Cheddar, one ‘Shroom & Swiss, one Arby-Q, and, bien sur, one French Dip & Swiss.

The FBI and local police said Wednesday they were trying to figure out why five French-Moroccan nationals tried to break into a Texas courthouse in the middle of the night.

At least five foreign nationals are in custody after the attempted break-in at the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio, which triggered a bomb scare and FBI terror investigation, a source close to the case tells FoxNews.com.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said the suspects are believed to be of French-Moroccan descent.

Very suspicious. Why would French people do that? Makes no sense.

Documents found inside the van showed the men, all in their 20s, had traveled extensively to high-level security facilities around the country, according to local media reports. Investigators also told the Associated Press that 90-day visas, maps, cell phones and computers were found inside the vehicle.

The source declined to comment on whether any bomb-making materials were found at the scene, saying only that the suspects’ motive is still under investigation.

Police said two of the men climbed a fire escape and entered an unlocked door on the fourth floor of the courthouse at around 2 a.m., KHOU.com reports.

The men allegedly told investigators that they were visiting from out of town and said they were trying to get a tour of the city, according to the station.

Now, that I can believe. The Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur—all the great French sites have aeries atop them for great views. These Frenchmen just wanted a view of Bexar County, as who would not?

But after the Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador and bomb the Israeli embassy (why does no one remember that?), I guess you can’t be too careful, even with Frenchmen.

The sheriff says the men started their road-trip across the United States in New Jersey in a rented RV, hitting the state of Florida before winding up in San Antonio.

The sheriff says the suspects spent about 30 minutes inside the courthouse, making off with a judge’s gavel.

Sources say none of the 5-men appear on any terror-watch list: that the trespassing tourists may have had just a little too much to drink.

“We know now that these individuals had been partying at a couple of the local bars. So, evidently they had been drinking prior to coming up here and we found a bottle of beer up in the courtroom,” said Ortiz.

What, is it spring break in France, or something?

Anyhow, I’m glad to hear it’s just a prank. Because these are the kinds of kids you’d want you daughter to bring home:

Yawn.

Wow, this has been out since Friday and very little coverage.

The heated Congressional investigation into the botched Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives program Operation Fast and Furious reached a whole new level on Friday.

New emails obtained by the Los Angeles Times appear to show senior Obama administration and White House officials were briefed on the gun-walking operation. The three White House officials implicated by the LA Times’ reporting are Kevin M. O’Reilly, the director of North American Affairs for the White House national security staff; Dan Restrepo, the president’s senior Latin American advisor; and Greg Gatjanis, a White House national security official.

The emails were sent between July 2010 and February 2011, before the scandalous ATF program was exposed, according the LA Times.

The LA Times says a senior administration official denies that the emails which lead Fast and Furious ATF agent William Newell sent to O’Reilly — who later briefed Restrepo and Gatjanis –included details on “investigative tactics” used in the program. By “investigative tactics,” the White House means how ATF agents facilitated the sale of firearms to drug cartels via “straw purchasers,” or people who could legally buy guns in the U.S. but did so with the intention of selling them to individuals who would traffic them to Mexico.

Those emails apparently show Newell and O’Reilly discussing how the program was affecting Mexico.

Another explosive new detail that emerged on Thursday was a set of documents showing senior officials in Phoenix attempting to cover up a connection between Fast and Furious weapons and U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s death.

In a letter sent to Ann Scheel, the new acting U.S. Attorney for Arizona, House Oversight committee chairman Rep. Darrell Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley wrote that high-ranking Phoenix officials tried to “prevent the connection [between Terry’s death and Fast and Furious weapons] from being disclosed.”

Internal emails also show that recently resigned Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke and his deputy Emory Hurley made the decision because “this way we do not divulge our current case (Fast and Furious) or the Border Patrol shooting case.”

UPDATE 3:04 p.m.:

Though the White House has claimed these newly discovered emails didn’t contain any details on the “investigative tactics” officials used in Operation Fast and Furious, one comment has surfaced suggesting otherwise. Politico reports that, in an August 18, 2010, email to O’Reilly, Newell described the details of what was going on.

I’m sure the NY Times and NPR will get around to this someday.

- Aggie

Bret Stephens in the WSJ:

How does this year’s phone hacking scandal at the now-defunct British tabloid News of the World—owned, I hardly need add, by News Corp., the Journal’s parent company—compare with last year’s contretemps over the release of classified information by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks and his partners at the New York Times, the Guardian and other newspapers?

Short answer, it doesn’t:

In both cases, secret information, initially obtained by illegal means, was disseminated publicly by news organizations that believed the value of the information superseded the letter of the law, as well as the personal interests of those whom it would most directly affect. In both cases, fundamental questions about the lengths to which a news organization should go in pursuit of a scoop have been raised. In both cases, a dreadful human toll has been exacted: The British parents of murdered 13-year-old Milly Dowler, led to the false hope that their child might be alive because some of her voice mails were deleted after her abduction; Afghan citizens, fearful of Taliban reprisals after being exposed by WikiLeaks as U.S. informants.

Both, in short, are despicable instances of journalistic malpractice, for which some kind of price ought to be paid. So why is one a scandal, replete with arrests, resignations and parliamentary inquests, while the other is merely a controversy, with Mr. Assange’s name mooted in some quarters for a Nobel Peace Prize?

The easy answer is that the news revealed by WikiLeaks was in the public interest, whereas what was disclosed by News of the World was merely of interest to the public. By this reckoning, if it’s a great matter of state, and especially if it’s a government secret, it’s fair game. Not so if it’s just so much tittle-tattle about essentially private affairs.

You can see the attraction of this argument—particularly if, like Mr. Assange, you are trying to fight extradition to Sweden on pending rape charges that you consider unworthy of public notice.

You can also see its attraction to anybody who claims to know what the public interest ought to be and is in a position to do something about it. In June 2006, the New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had a secret—and highly effective—program to monitor thousands of banking transactions in an effort to stop terrorism financing. Several months later, the Times’ own public editor argued that the program was entirely legal and that the article should never have been published. The Gray Lady moved on.

Would that she did.

There is more. But I especially like his close:

It’s probably inevitable that this column will be read in some quarters as shilling for Rupert Murdoch. Not at all: I have nothing but contempt for the hack journalism practiced by some of the Murdoch titles. But my contempt goes double for the self-appointed media paragons who saw little amiss with Mr. Assange and those who made common cause with him, and who now hypocritically talk about decency and standards. Their day of reckoning is yet to come.

Yes, but when?

Takes notes, people. This will be on the test:

WALLACE: I’m not asking you why it was OK to shoot Usama bin Laden. I fully understand the threat. And I’m not second-guessing the SEALs.

DONILON: Right.

WALLACE: What I am second guessing is, if that’s OK, why can’t you do waterboarding? What can’t you do enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was just as bad an operator as Usama bin Laden?

DONILON: Because, well, our judgment is that it’s not consistent with our values, not consistent and not necessary in terms of getting the kind of intelligence that we need.

WALLACE: But shooting bin Laden in the head is consistent with our values?

DONILON: We are at war with Usama bin Laden.

WALLACE: We’re at war with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

DONILON: It was a military operation, right? It was absolutely appropriate for the SEALs to take the action — forced it to take the action that they took in this military operation against a military target.

WALLACE: But why is it inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

DONILON: I didn’t say it was inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

WALLACE: You said it was against our values.

(CROSSTALK)

DONILON: I think the technique — there’s been a policy debate about and our administration has made our views known on that.

You might also be interested to learn that while it is wrong to listen to telephone calls of terrorists overseas, it is perfectly fine to implant chips controlled by the government in cell phones:

A new emergency alert system that sends notifications to cell phones in the event of a disaster or terrorist attack will be implemented in New York and Washington by the end of this year, officials said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday unveiled PLAN, the Personal Localized Alerting Network, which is expected to provide residents with timely information “alerting them to imminent safety threats in their area.”

Mobile phone users will receive “geographically targeted, text-like messages,” according to a written statement from the Federal Communications Commission.

“Every weekday our population of 8.4 million residents swells to more than 12 million as commuters and tourists come to town,” Bloomberg told reporters. “Under the PLAN program, we’ll be able to broadcast (emergency) messages to any of them who are within our target area.”

Mobile customers will receive three types of alerts containing 90 characters or less, ranging from presidential alerts to child abduction bulletins.

Phone carriers may allow subscribers to block all but presidential alerts, officials said.

A special chip is needed to allow phones to receive the notifications, though many “smart” phones already have the new technology, said FCC spokesman Neil Grace.

The system will also be able to send messages when cell phone towers experience network congestion, overriding other calls to deliver the notification.

What if Bush’s national security team had tried this? What if they had tried to justify the execution style killing of bin Laden? Would people be so sheep-like?

The Obama administration has posted details about its plans to the new Defense Department building bomb resistant on a website.

Dopes.

In what officials admit is a major breach of security, a document describing design features intended to make a new Defense Department building bomb-resistant has been posted on a public government website.

- Aggie

Good name for a law firm.

The Glob may have “missed” the Inspector General’s report on health insurance fraud (see below), but they did slip this one in the inner pages:

The review process on releasing potentially sensitive government files from the Homeland Security Department to the public was onerous and overly political, a key official in the process had complained in a series of e-mails in late 2009.

Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan, who was appointed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said she wanted to change the process, according to uncensored e-mails newly obtained by the Associated Press. In the e-mails, she warned that the Homeland Security Department might be sued over delays the political reviews were causing, and she hinted that a reporter might find out about the process.

The reviews are the subject of a congressional hearing later this week and an ongoing inquiry by the department’s inspector general.

“This level of attention is CRAZY,’’ Callahan wrote in December 2009 to her then-deputy, Catherine Papoi.

Callahan said she hoped someone outside the Obama administration would discover details of the political reviews, possibly by asking for evidence of them under the Freedom of Information Act itself: “I really, really want someone to FOIA this whole damn process,’’ Callahan wrote.

…

Less than one week after Callahan’s e-mail, on Dec. 21, the Associated Press formally requested the records about the controversial political vetting. The agency ultimately turned over more than 995 pages of e-mails last summer, after a seven-month fight.

But the e-mails were heavily censored under a provision in the Freedom of Information Act allowing the government to withhold passages that describe internal policy-making deliberations.

The newly obtained versions of the same internal e-mails are not censored. They show that insiders described the unusual political vetting as “meddling,’’ “nuts,’’ and “bananas!’’

So, it doesn’t sound like a sclerotic bureaucracy—far from it. Someone, ahem, was actively involved in interference. Given that Obama made transparency one of his highest priorities—just like closing Gitmo and bringing the troops home—I have a pretty good idea who’s gumming up the works.

What’s the old expression? Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the power to reach into your pants means the power to pick you pocket:

Two agents working for the Transportation Security Administration have been arrested after stealing from passengers at New York’s JFK airport.

The New York Daily News reports that Davon Webb and Persad Coumar were ratted out by a colleague. Both have worked for the TSA for over five years.

The theft that doomed the two involved pocketing $40,000 from a passenger’s bag. After being interrogated they confessed to stealing as much as $160,000 from passengers, selecting victims’ bags at random.

A representative of the TSA told the Daily News that the agency’s 50,000 employees should not be stigmatized by the “disgraceful actions of a few.”

The “few” bad apples include Michael Arato, a Newark TSA supervisor who pleaded guilty on Monday to stealing thousands of dollars from passengers at the New Jersey airport.

Arato partnered with a subordinate TSA agent to conduct the thefts. The two agents stole tens of thousands of dollars from passengers while either subjecting them to additional screening or while screening their bags.

Yet another TSA employee was arrested on January 27 in Memphis, Tennessee for attempting to steal a passenger’s laptop from a screening area.

If you add these bad apples to the bad apples that download x-ray images of passengers in their birthday suits and the bad apples that call over their buddies to take a look at some woman’s thong and the bad apples that select passengers to screen based on the size of their rack—plus the (relatively speaking) good apples who decide that the all-American family of four is a threat to national security, requiring the application of latex gloves to sensitive areas—you have a melange of apples fit only for hog slop.

When the archives are written, the total resignation over this level of intrusion into our lives will mark a key turning point. We won’t let our government employ sophisticated identification and psychological profiling to maintain our safety—but we will allow them to have a Kodak moment with our junk. And the political Left, which screamed bloody murder at the thought of wiretapping overseas terrorist’s phone calls (recently renewed without a Leftist peep under Obama), merely drops its drawers and bends over. We’d better all get used to it.

Teaching us, once again, how short and fleeting is the memory of the typical citizen.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows that 29% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Thirty-six percent (36%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -7 (see trends).

Those numbers reflect the best ratings for the president since early April 2010, nine months ago.

Sorry to bring you bad news, but I’ve always been attracted to reality.

- Aggie

Leaked cables cause US to move rights activists to safe locations.

The State Department is warning hundreds of human rights activists, foreign government officials and businesspeople identified in leaked diplomatic cables of potential threats to their safety and has moved a handful of them to safer locations, administration officials said Thursday.
State’s Secrets

The operation, which involves a team of 30 in Washington and embassies from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, reflects the administration’s fear that the disclosure of cables obtained by the organization WikiLeaks has damaged American interests by exposing foreigners who supply valuable information to the United States.

Administration officials said they were not aware of anyone who has been attacked or imprisoned as a direct result of information in the 2,700 cables that have been made public to date by WikiLeaks, The New York Times and several other publications, many with some names removed. But they caution that many dissidents are under constant harassment from their governments, so it is difficult to be certain of the cause of actions against them.

The officials declined to discuss details about people contacted by the State Department in recent weeks, saying only that a few were relocated within their home countries and that a few others were moved abroad.

The State Department is mainly concerned about the cables that have yet to be published or posted on Web sites — nearly 99 percent of the archive of 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks. With cables continuing to trickle out, they said, protecting those identified will be a complex, delicate and long-term undertaking. The State Department said it had combed through a majority of the quarter-million cables and distributed many to embassies for review by diplomats there.

- Aggie