Where are the Other Abdulmutallabs?

Given what we knew about Awlaki, Major Hasan’s contacts with him should
have set off major alarm bells throughout U.S. intelligence, law
enforcement and defense agencies.   This doesn’t appear to have
happened, although the administration to date has refused to fully
brief Congress on how it responded after Fort Hood.  It is clear we did
not ratchet up our efforts against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
nor did we employ every effort to locate Awlaki in order to disrupt his
activities and confront him on the battlefield.  

The Fort Hood
shooting was dismissed by administration officials as an “isolated
incident” and carried out by a “lone wolf.”   The Obama administration
refused to believe Hasan’s e-mail communications with Awlaki was
evidence that the Fort Hood shooting was a terrorist incident
influenced by al-Qaeda.  Instead, Hasan’s case was treated as a
criminal offense by a mentally deranged person.  Nothing was done about
the Awlaki connection.  This was a serious mistake.  

The Obama
administration should have taken seriously Hasan’s ties to Anwar
al-Awlaki and employed all intelligence, military and diplomatic
measures against Awlaki after the November Fort Hood shooting.  The
recent ramp-up in counterterrorism efforts by the Obama administration
in response to the Christmas Day attack comes weeks too late.

President
Obama’s failure to appreciate the seriousness of the Fort Hood and
Detroit attacks reflects fundamental problems in his approach to
national security and terrorism.  His administration not only has had
difficulty in using the word “terrorism,” it even tried to replace it
with the incomprehensible term “man-caused disasters.”   The Obama
administration says that we are at war with al-Qaeda but has tried to
treat terrorism as a criminal matter, apparently in the belief that if
we talk nicely to terrorists and grant them U.S. constitutional
protections, they won’t attack us.  Obama officials have condemned
tough Bush-era counterterrorism policies as “the politics of fear” and
the president has apologized for America’s approach to the Muslim
world.   

Time is short to prevent the next al-Qaeda attack.  We
must assume there are other Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabs in the pipeline
and that al-Qaeda has identified other vulnerabilities in our security
systems that it plans to exploit.   It is crucial that the Obama
administration fully understand the meaning of the second wake-up call
it received with the Detroit terrorist attack: we are at war with
radical jihadists.  Only the bravery of passengers and crew of Flight
253 and a lot of luck prevented a Christmas Day catastrophe over
Detroit.   The Obama administration must put forward an aggressive and
realistic strategy to protect our nation from the next radical Jihadist
attack.  We can’t count on luck to keep our nation safe.

Crossposted from Human Events.