Conservatives Defending Liberty

On Wednesday in a hearing before the US Senate, Director of the National Counter Terrorism Center, Michael Leiter told the senators that people on terrorist watch lists were and have been in the past permitted to enter the United States so they government could better track their movements and try to gain information from them. So in simple terms, they believe they can play secret agent games with terrorists.

Now believe me when I say this, I am all for the government using every tool at its disposal to stop terrorism. If gaining intelligence from them is the goal then I am for that as well. My problem goes like this. First, when the story started to unfold about the  Christmas Bomber, its was made clear that US Intelligence was going to interview him when he got off the plane in Detroit, they admitted they knew he was on the plane. This is problem number one. They were attempting to carry out one of their intel ops and except by the grace of God, they would have gotten almost 300 people killed and sent the nation into a frenzy. So going out the door we know these operations can and will go wrong. Second, there are now 4 different watch lists, four. The infamous TIDES list is made up of approximately 550,000 people, the next is the FBI Terrorist Watch List which is about 400,000 people. Then the last two, another more severe watch list and then finally the “no fly” list which has about 14,000 people on it including the now famous 8 year old boy scout who couldn’t get on a plane with his parents last week. The Christmas Day Bomber was on the TIDES list. With four different levels of terrorist watch lists, sooner or later we will make a mistake about who goes on which list, we did on Christmas.

Even Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein was making the point that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should have been placed on the no fly list as she believed that there was plenty of reason to do it. Why he was not moved up the list is not known as no one in the Obama administration is talking. Feinstein went on to state she is against letting anyone on any of the lists into the country for any reason. Again, gathering intelligence is great and we need to do it. Yet, this administration has shown multiple times that they seem unconcerned over terrorism. Even with the Christmas Bomber they stopped gathering valuable information after less than an hours of talking with him, less than one hour.

Playing spy games has been going on for decades, we did it sometimes well, sometimes not so well with the Russians and Chinese for 50 plus years. The issue here is not doing it, the issue here is that the Obama administration seems unable to manage much of anything well and these cases place peoples lives in jeopardy. Playing like your James Bond or Jack Bauer had better be left for television, not a career civil servant with a pocket protector who reads too many spy novels. This is a high stakes game, if your going to play this game which as a nation we may very well have to, you need to place a large amount of care and diligence in how you do it. Unfortunately this administration will not even tell the truth about what happened on Christmas or any other operations they may have botched. Until you can trust them, its hard to believe they are getting it right.