The Obama administration has wrongly downplayed, in its public remarks, the threat of terrorist attacks on the United States and American interests abroad. Now that the evidence of multiple plots against Americans has become unmistakable, it is time for candor.
In his early efforts to distance himself from the Bush administration, this president dropped the term “war on terror” from the government’s vocabulary. In initial comments on the three terrorist attacks the nation has suffered since last November, two of them luckily unsuccessful, his appointed officials have suggested that they were unconnected events, “one-offs” as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano described the Times Square plot.
But the November murders at Fort Hood, Texas, by Army Major Nidal Hassan turned out to be inspired by a radical Muslim preacher in Yemen. Yemen turned up again when an al-Qaida cell there sent the Christmas Day bomber Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit wearing explosives hidden in his underwear.
Now the Times Square bomber — thankfully, another failure — turns out to have been trained in bomb-making in Pakistan’s “Federally Administered Tribal Areas,” a region bordering Afghanistan that is largely under the control of the militant Taliban groups that play host to al-Qaida.
I think Obama should put his foot down. Just tell the Attorney General to get the Courts to issue an injunction against this sort of thing. After all this is simple a law enforcement matter isn’t it?