Obama Team Fails To Prevent Airline Bomber & Then Claims “System Worked”

A known radicalized Muslim, despite previously having been reported to authorities by his concerned and fearful father and despite being on some kind of security watch list, on Christmas Day buys a one-way ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and in-flight sets off a bomb that he smuggled aboard. The explosion that would have killed all aboard doesn’t happen only because of the bomber’s incompetence in properly setting off his device, which we hear could have brought down the plane, and because of the quick interference by a vigilant passenger, the “Flying Dutchman”, who lunged across seats to grab the bomber and extinguish a flame he had ignited.

Janet Napolitano, the Obama appointee who heads the Homeland Security Department, the federal agency responsible for, among other things, airline security, said of the almost-successful airplane bombing: “the system worked” (link). This is the woman who incorrectly said at one point that the September 11, 2001, terrorists entered the United States from Canada, and who has directed her Department to refer to terrorist attacks as “man-caused disasters”.

Unlike so many of Obama’s other acolytes, who are just dangerous to Americans, Napolitano is an idiot as well. But her fecklessness toward Islamic terrorism is, as the saying goes, not a bug but a feature for this pseudo-moderate President who is culturally a blend of Islam and black radical pseudo-Christianity and who feels that the sins of the West in general and of the United States in particular are the understandable fuel for Islamic terrorism.

The indefatigable Jennifer Rubin writes (link) at Commentary Magazine’s Contentions blog:

Janet Napolitano’s the “system worked” remark is going to go down as one of those memorably idiotic statements that for better or worse become forever associated with an official’s name…. It reveals a fundamental policy cluelessness and sense of denial that we have learned, unfortunately, permeates the entire Obama administration…. A Georgetown University terrorism expert added, “This incident was a compound failure of both intelligence and physical security, leaving prevention to the last line of defense — the passengers themselves.” But the smartest observation comes from Ken Dunlap, security director of the International Air Transport Association: “We’ve spent eight years looking for little scissors and toenail clippers. . . Perhaps the emphasis should be looking for bad people.” But that would entail being candid about who the “bad people” are.

Being candid about who the “bad people” are was not a hallmark of the Bush Administration, with, for example, its random rather than targeted searches at airports, and it isn’t remotely true of the Obama Administration.

John M Greco