Barack Obama gets an 'F' for protecting Americans
By Toby Harnden, UK Telegraph
There is no more solemn duty for an American commander-in-chief than the marshalling of "all elements of American power" - the phrase Obama himself used on Monday - to protect the people of the United States.
In that key respect, Obama failed on Christmas Day, just as President George W. Bush failed on September 11th (though he succeeded in the seven years after that).
Yes, the buck stops in the Oval Office. Obama may have rather smugly given himself a "B+" for his 2008 performance but he gets an F for the events that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam with a PETN bomb sewn
into his underpants. He said today that a "systemic failure has
occurred."
Well, he's in charge of that system. The picture we're getting is more and more alarming by the hour. Here are some key elements to consider:
1. Abdulmutallab's father spoke several times to the US Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria and visited a CIA officer there to tell him, apparently, that he feared his son was a jihadist being trained in Yemen. According to CNN, the CIA officer wrote up a report, which then sat in the CIA headquarters at Langley for several weeks without being disseminated to the rest of the intelligence community.
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