On December 26, two days after Nigerian crotch bomber Omar Abdulmutallab attempted to use underwear packed with explosives to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight he was on, and as it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns -- if any -- from the Bush Administration. The idea was to show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps and classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and would be probably be declassified (as they have done before) if necessary.The White House is in full defensive spin mode. A flurry of memos were generated on December 26th, 27th, and 28th, which developed talking points about how Obama's decision to effectively shut down the Homeland Security Council (it was merged earlier this year into the National Security Council, run by National Security Adviser James Jones) had nothing to do with what Obama called a "catastrophic" failure on Christmas Day. Faced with a public crisis of confidence in the transportation security infrastructure, Obama’s first instincts are to go on offense against domestic political critics and to initiate a coordinated damage control campaign. Their lowest-common-denominator mentality appears to be, “no matter how bad things are, we just need to make sure that the public perceives our domestic political opponents to be even worse, because that’s how you win hotly contested political campaigns.”
Another reason Obama might have initially responded to the underwear bomber incident by going on the offensive with a coordinated damage control campaign was that they knew administration staffers had personally botched some aspect of the pre-Christmas security planning. Newsweek is reporting that a White House advisor was briefed in October on the underwear bomb technique. And the British press is reporting that MI5 knew of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s extermist links. At this point, it is unclear whether any Obama administration officials did something (or failed to do something) that could have contributed to a potentially horrific security lapse; but if that did happen, it might help explain the administration’s behavior in the days following the incident.
This White House doesn't view the Northwest Airlines failure as one of national security, it's a political issue. It seems by their statements and actions, that it doesn't consider international Islamic terrorism to be as grave a threat to American national security as it should. It can not continue to frequently deflects responsibility and/or makes excuses for its policy failures.
The Obama administration is engaging in the Groucho Marx approach to national security :
"The system worked and we're even tougher than George Bush. So who are you going to believe; us or your own eyes?"
