Obama: The Buck Stops With Me (Except When it Doesn't)

Politico reports (emphasis mine):

“As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility,” Obama said.

Obama said an intelligence review found that the U.S. government had the information needed to thwart the plot but failed to do so because of a series of compounding shortcomings, including that intelligence analysts didn’t focus heavily enough on information warning that al-Qaida in Yemen wanted to strike the United States…

Obama’s buck-stops-here message marks a change in tone from earlier statements in which Obama and other officials repeatedly noted that the watch-listing system that failed to flag the suspect, Umar AbdulMatallab, was put in place under the Bush administration.

You know I’d like to be able to commend the President for doing what his Administration should have done right out of the gate in accepting responsibility for this series of blatant security failures. But the cynical side of me suspects that this is an attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that the TSA and DHS under Janet Napolitano conducted a comprehensive review of the terrorist watch list system in 2009, and adamantly defended the status quo.

Yes, indeed they did. In a congressionally mandated report published by the Inspector General (OIG) of the DHS in July 2009. A report which was circulated widely within the executive branch agencies dealing with national security, including the desk of Janet Napolitano. A report which even elicited a direct response letter from Michael Leiter of the National Counterterrorism Center, proving that he too bought off on the report’s conclusions.

Many of the sections and key findings of the report are redacted, but what is clear from reading the TSA’s response to the OIG’s findings is that they had no intention of deviating from the status quo in using only the more limited No-Fly and Selectee lists for passenger screening. As opposed to screening passengers against the full list of possible terrorist suspects. In fact, the TSA’s response to the one tangible recommendation made by the OIG was that it “raised privacy and other concerns”, and that it was “highly unlikely” that the No Fly and Selectee lists would be revised based on the OIG’s recommendation. (See my original report on Verum Serum for additional details on the OIG report.)

What is also undeniable is that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would not have boarded that plane to Detroit if the TSA had screened him against the comprehensive terrorist database. This was actually a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission Report, and concern over this was the reason Congress mandated that DHS conduct this review.

So back to the press conference at the end of the week. The Administration would have known that sooner or later news about this report would leak into the broader media. Especially if they continued in their ridiculous attempt to blame the Bush Administration for the multiple failures leading up to 12/25. So they wisely decided to stop pointing fingers.

Key senators, including Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein have now called for the No-Fly list to be expanded to include all known terrorist suspects. The Administration apparently remains opposed to this idea, over efficiency and privacy concerns I suspect. Given what’s at stake, this is one of the few times I find myself sympathetic to the concerns of Dianne Feinstein and I hope she presses the Administration on this issue in the Senate hearings on this matter later this month.