Congress Says U.S. Repeated 9/11 Failures in Christmas Day Bombing Plot

One change I would suggest is for the president to leave our intelligence comminities alone and let them do their job. When they are continually thrown under the bus and threatened with prosecution for doing their job, which, by the way, is keeping America safe from attacks, it makes it difficult to concentrate on the task at hand.

Most of our intelligence people are true professionals and would never let some of the things obama has done affect the way they do their job. Unconciously though, there has to be a little shred of self preservation in the back of their minds. Also, when the most valuable tools you have are taken away from you, it makes it difficult to do your job.

I think some of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of the American people. After 9/11 we were united in our resolve to stand against the evil that attacked us. As it has begun to fade from our memory, we have allowed our government to lose focus. obama has no focus on terrorism. He and his gang of thugs would rather look at us, United States citizens, with suspicion than the people who are really out to do us harm. He and his people are determined to focus on the people who disagree with his socialist policies rather than fighting the radical islamic terrorists who wish us all dead. When our government refuses to call it terrorism, where does that leave us? It leaves us relying on incompetent terrorists, dumb luck and alert citizens...

From FoxNews

Despite a top-to-bottom overhaul of the U.S. intelligence community after the 2001 terrorist attacks, security officials repeated some of the same mistakes nearly a decade later and allowed a would-be Nigerian bomber to slip aboard an airliner, congressional investigators said Tuesday.

The Senate intelligence committee report contradicted the Obama administration's assertion that the potentially catastrophic Dec. 25 Christmas Day bombing attempt was unlike Sept. 11 because it represented a failure to understand intelligence, not a failure to collect and understand it.

"We respectfully disagree," the committee wrote. "Some of the systemic errors this review identified also were cited as failures prior to 9/11."

The congressional review is more stark than the Obama administration's report. It lays much of the blame at the feet of the National Counterterrorism Center, which Congress created to be the primary agency in charge of analyzing terrorism intelligence.

"NCTC failed to fulfill its mission," lawmakers found.

"It's vital that reforms be made quickly to prevent future attacks by Al Qaeda, its affiliates and other terrorist groups," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the committee, said in a written statement.

"The Christmas Day attempt and the recent attempted bombing in Times Square show that we are targets, and we must stay one step ahead of the terrorists," she said.

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., vice chairman of the committee, said "there is no longer any doubt that major intelligence failures allowed the Christmas Day bomber to almost turn our airplanes into deadly weapons once again."

"We cannot depend on dumb luck, incompetent terrorists, and alert citizens to keep our families safe," he said. "It is critical we make changes to prevent these types of intelligence failures in the future."