A Systemic Failure
Posted by lemon | Filed under HOT Issues
Conservatives say President Obama is not aggressive enough. Liberals say he has no difference with President Bush. Let’s see who is right.
President Obama dramatically changed words of his administration’s response to the Christmas Day attack, saying that it was just a “systemic failure”.
The Flight in the Christmas Day attack
In a statement on Tuesday, President Barack Obama said that it was clear a ’systemic failure’ had occurred in connection with the failed attack on a Detroit-bound passenger plane on Christmas Day. Mr. President, are you joking with your people?
Is Obama, as many conservatives say, someone who has fundamentally shifted American security priorities from Bush’s offensive policies to a passive emphasis on legal process and law enforcement?
“A systemic failure has occurred,” he told reporters in Hawaii, where he is vacationing with family. “And I consider that totally unacceptable.”
It’s a sharper tone than the one assumed by White House spokesman, whose talking points in Sunday talk shows were: The system worked. The traveling public can be confident.
The president also set a Thursday deadline for preliminary findings on reviews of the terrorist watch list system and air travel screening, which were ordered after the attack.
These will tell us more, he said. “But what already is apparent is that there was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security.”
“You have to understand that you need information that is specific and credible if you’re going to actually bar someone from air travel,” Secretary Napolitano said “State of the Union” on Sunday.
In a phone interview, Rep. Dan Lundgren of California, a top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee said “It underscores the lack of urgency we see in Obama administration and Democrat-controlled Congress with regard to those who wish to kill us.”
“I am most interested in what the investigation will reveal about the bureaucratic mindset,” writes Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver in Foreign Policy Magazine. “The Obama administration has … made a big point of seeking to reinstate the law enforcement mindset throughout the counterterrorism enterprise.”
The policies the Obama administration is taking is less clear now. He has changed the approaches. During the Bush years, Americans take the fight to others, charge them find them and then destroy them by whatever means necessary. On the threat from terrorism, Mr. Bush exercised leadership. And now Obama is urged to rule the roost.
If there is anyone who is interested in hot issues happening everyday in the world, who is curious about those prominent political figures’ lives, who is yearn for leaning more about the word, here is your place. Our blog focuses on those well-known political issues and figures of all countries. It covers everything you want to learn, say, those political affairs, something behind those issues as well as the private life of those famous people.