For those of you who watched the movie, you might recall that the title of my post is a quote from the movie "Cool Hand Luke". I thought it did a pretty good job of describing what happened with the failed Christmas bombing.
In this article I got from the NY Times, Pres. Obama believes, "This was not a failure to collect intelligence...It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we already had." Wow, first the State Dinner's uninvited guests (by the way, there was a third uninvited guest; it was some guy who snuck in with this delegation from India), and now this. The President is probably getting pissed off, as was evident in his remarks during the security agencies meeting today. While he is pretty ticked off, Pres. Obama knows that pointing the finger at individuals will not help the situation. All we can do now is learn from our mistakes, primarily that COMMUNICATION IS KEY IN OUR SECURITY.
The beef-up in security kicked in pretty fast, and pretty far. When I was coming back to the US from Fiji over winter break, I had to go through a search of my bags three times and a physical inspection! Yeah, it was annoying, especially the part of me having to leave my water in the room they searched us in, but if it's part of their new security measures, I suppose I can't really complain. I just hope that now that each agency has learned a valuable lesson from all this.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
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4 comments:
Annie and I posted something similar to this recently as well. I think integrating and understanding intelligence we already have is a MUCH EASIER task than collecting it. I think he's trying to save face for all of the blow-ups intelligence has had lately. He's probably disappointed. I would be firing people. Lax doesn't exist in the dictionary. Don't bother looking for it, it's not there.
“This isn’t a problem of intelligence sharing, but rather a problem related to ensuring that all the wealth of information we had was appropriately correlated, analyzed and highlighted.”
I think its more of a problem of ensuring that there are actions that will follow intelligence sharing.I'm not exactly sure what happened or whether they even had information about such an incident; but public safety should be enforced strictly. If the person knows that the airport will check common places, then most likely he will put the weapon somewhere else. Although it may be inconvenient, wouldn't it be safer and better for the economy if airports to hire more people to ensure airport safety? If its a job and not a request (to report suspicious activity), it may lower the chances of more of these incidents occurring. Just a thought. xD
I feel no matter how many measures the government makes to improve airplane security, there will always be some case of someone slipping by the system. It's been shown in the past. First there was 9/11, which everyone knows tightened airport security. Then there was that incident with someone bringing a liquid bomb on a plane, which prohibited liquids exceeding a certain volume on planes. And now, the Christmas bombing, which requires passengers to be physically searched.
In my opinion, you have to kill this problem at its root. Yes beefing up security at airports is important, but the government must also fund research, hire more personnel, put people undercover, to outsmart criminals before they even step in the airport. In other words, they need to always stay two steps ahead of the criminal. Unfortunately, I don't think it will be too realistic to achieve this goal.
I agree with Andrew. If the gov. can collect information, but is having trouble sharing it, then that is pretty strange. Also, nice reference to a movie Jodi.
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