A report on the Christmas day underwear bomber is due out and the White House national security adviser James Jones says that Americans should be prepared to be shocked.
Americans will feel “a certain shock” when a report is released today detailing the intelligence failures that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day airline bomber from ever boarding the plane.
In an interview published Thursday in USA Today, White House national security adviser James Jones said President Obama “is legitimately and correctly alarmed that things that were available, bits of information that were available, patterns of behavior that were available, were not acted on.”
“That’s two strikes,” he was quoted as saying, referring to the failed Northwest jet attack and the shooting massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in November. The Army base attack left 13 dead after officials failed to act on intelligence identifying suspected gunman Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as a threat to fellow soldiers.I’m detecting a disturbing trend on what some people are shocked by.
They are shocked by the fact that a Muslim man with contacts to Al Qeada, who was on a terrorist watch list, and who’s own father warned was ready to carry out an attack would attempt to blow up a plane over U.S. soil.
They are shocked by the fact that a Muslim man with a record of making threatening statements and with contacts to radical figures in Yemen would go on a shooting spree on a U.S. military base.
They are shocked by the fact that a humongous stimulus plan and a series of bailouts have yet to turn around the economy. Instead they are forced to focus on imaginary “jobs that would have hypothetically been lost” when looking at unemployment numbers.
They are shocked when monthly indicators show that unemployment remains high and that housing starts and housing sales continue to drop. Such data is labeled as “unexpected”. The meme is that we are in a recovery–how could indicators be negative?
They are shocked by the fact that a majority of Americans don’t like the current version of the health care bill after it was achieved with a series of blatant vote buying and corruption. They are so shocked that they feel the need to complete the passage of the bill behind closed doors.
They are shocked by the fact that massive funding opportunities supporting research and associated technologies led scientists to obscure and falsify climate data to support a view that such funding was paramount.
Personally, the thing I am most shocked by is that they continue to be shocked by these “unexpected” events.
