RUSH: ‘US intelligence officials, under pressure to better track terrorist threats, are hampered by their own vast bureaucracy and an overwhelming flow of information, analysts say’ from the French News Agency. Now, when Obama is in the White House, ‘Oh, it’s understandable that we’ve got intel that may not be quite up to snuff. Oh, it’s so sad! (sobbing) We’re so sorry. They’re so overworked and they have such a vast bureaucracy, and there’s an overwhelming flow of information, and they’re just under pressure. They’re hampered.’ Yeah, the French News Agency now has a total understanding of the difficulties. ‘President Barack Obama ‘has now discovered that he’s inherited an intelligence community in the United States which is bloated, bureaucratic and even with the best of intentions has become so large it finds it very hard to put together the pieces,’ Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, told AFP.’ So there you have it.
People ask me, ‘Why is Obama being so blunt here? Why is he saying it’s the second strike and there aren’t going to be three strikes? Why is he saying that this is a ‘screw up’?’ Well, here is your answer: Because he can once again dump on Bush — and the Drive-By, State-Controlled world media is helping right along. ‘President Barack Obama ‘has now discovered that he’s inherited an intelligence community in the United States which is bloated, bureaucratic and even with the best of intentions has become so large it finds it very hard to put together the pieces…” Homeland Security wasn’t even necessary as far as I am concerned. It just created a whole new bureaucracy. As I saw last week somewhere, I don’t remember where, some smart person said, ‘We already had a Department of Homeland Security. It’s located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.’ That’s where the White House is, for those of you in Rio Linda — and that’s true. But all of a sudden now, it’s too bloated, it’s too big, it’s just unwieldy.
Poor, President Obama! It’s too much for anybody to keep up with. Now, you remember all those stories, I’m sure, making excuses for Bush before and after 9/11, when intelligence agencies were even more overloaded. I’m sure you remember those stories where Bush was sympathized with, right? Nah, I don’t remember them, either. We can’t wait to hear the excuses when this bunch runs one-sixth of our economy, when they take over the health care system. If they think they’re overloaded with a bureaucracy now — if they’ve got an inflow of information that it’s too hard to put together — I mean, for crying out loud, wait until they deal with health care!
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RUSH: Here’s Jay in northern Virginia, great to have you on the program, sir, thank you for waiting.
CALLER: Rush, on behalf of my beautiful wife, my brother Dave, and my parents and millions of listeners, welcome back to the airwaves. It’s a pleasure to hear you on the radio again.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: There’s a reason that the president and our security officials are concerned about the Detroit bomber. Eighty grams of PETN detonated over a wing spar would have brought the plane down, and I don’t think America knows how close we came to losing that aircraft. We’re upset in the aviation community. We want Dennis Blair and Janet Napolitano to explain to us why, if Umar was on the watch list and not the no-fly list, why wasn’t word given to the flight crew that there was a passenger on board that hadn’t —
RUSH: Yeah. That’s a good question.
CALLER: We could have isolated the passenger, not made a big scene, but could have isolate him and realized –nobody knew there was a bomb on board but we could have isolated him and secured this man from even trying to detonate the bomb.
RUSH: And we did know after he was on the plane — that’s one of the big stories today — we knew after he was on the plane, so we knew exactly as you say, who the guy was, he was on the plane. He was on a no-fly list but his father had also warned everybody, be careful of my son, he’s going loco and that dot was not connected and now we’re hearing, ‘Well, that’s because President Obama is so overloaded now with a bloated bureaucracy and there’s so much information coming in,’ and this is all necessary to be able to dump all this on George W. Bush.
CALLER: It’s amazing. We are very concerned in the aviation community. Please keep up the good work and see if Mr. Blair or Ms. Napolitano will call you and let you know why we weren’t notified that there was a passenger of interest on board a flight that covered 4900 miles, ten hours in the air, and nothing, no word.
RUSH: Well, look, people are just plain incompetent. They could call and explain it all they want but that’s the explanation. By the way, a story out of Reuters: ‘A man who described himself as a Palestinian and said he wanted to ‘kill all the Jews’ was hauled off a Detroit-bound Delta Air Lines flight in Miami and arrested, authorities said on Thursday. … Mansor Mohammad Asad of Toledo, Ohio, began making loud anti-Semitic comments and chanting, apparently in Arabic, Miami-Dade police said in a statement. ‘I’m Palestinian and I want (to) kill all Jews.” I wonder, is anybody going to want to go to Detroit after this? This is another guy that wanted to go to Detroit. Folks, I’m going to tell you something (I’ll probably get in big trouble for this) but if you import people from the Third World, you get people from the Third World.
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RUSH: Everybody is breathlessly awaiting Obama to speak on the security problems involving the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber. (panting) Breathlessly waiting because of this: ‘White House national security adviser James Jones says Americans will feel ‘a certain shock’ when they read an account being released Thursday of the missed clues that could have prevented the alleged Christmas Day bomber from ever boarding the plane. 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,’ Jones said in an interview Wednesday with USA TODAY.
‘That’s two strikes,” Jones said, and there aren’t going to be three. He doesn’t want a third strike, and neither does anybody else. ‘The White House plans to release an unclassified report Thursday on what went wrong in the incident involving a 23-year-old Nigerian man.’
Do you want to take any bets that at the end of the explanation, it’s going to have something to do with ‘we inherited from our predecessors’? The French News Agency has already set it up. ‘Oh, poor Obama, poor Obama. The bureaucracy is so big, and there are so many bits of information coming in it’s just impossible to keep up with.’ That’s where it’s headed. You wait. It’s going to be problematic. I don’t think this is playing anymore; I don’t think it’s selling anymore; I think a lot of people are looking at him as a spoiled little brat continuing to blame Bush. But when he gets into his second year after the State of the Union speech, whenever that is — oh, you want to know something about that? There are two dates for this, January 26th, I think, and February 2nd. It might be the 22nd and the 2nd. And the White House has to decide which of the following two shows they want to delay, the season premiere of Lost or American Idol. Whichever night they choose, one of those shows is going to be delayed. And of course they’re very sensitive to it because the fans of those two shows are rabid, Lost and American Idol. And I think what’s going to happen, folks, you Lost fans are the ones that are going to get creamed here. They’re not going to preempt American Idol. Obama does not want to have lower TV ratings than some other show on at the same time. So that’s what they’ll do.
Back to the phones we go. This is Bill, Aiken, South Carolina, welcome to the EIB Network, sir.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I don’t know what the report’s going to have today but I don’t think Americans should be shocked, and the reason is because if the boss is interested, the workers are interested. Obama treats the security of this country and his responsibilities as a commander-in-chief as unwanted diversions. His first priority is domestic, he wants to change the fabric of the country, and anything that interferes with that is treated as an unwelcome annoyance.
RUSH: Amen. That’s exactly right.
CALLER: You could tell when he came out, what is it, four days after the Christmas Day bombing effort that he didn’t want to be there, he was annoyed, he resented being there, and this man has no interest, first and foremost, in terms of being commander-in-chief. He wants to be domestic-in-chief, nothing more, nothing less.
RUSH: I think it’s exactly right. I think all this stuff, Afghanistan, everything to do with foreign policy, national security is an inconvenience, a political inconvenience. And you’re right, it was three days after the Christmas bomber incident happened, and it was a very short press conference, no emotion whatsoever, couples it with, ‘That’s a big screw up,’ and now this big report. I agree with you, nobody ought to be shocked because this guy can’t even pronounce the name Al-Qaeda. We’ve got this guy, do you realize what a treasure trove of information this guy would be? This guy met with an imam, this guy probably has connections to Al-Qaeda. But we’re not going to get anything out of him because we’re treating him as an American citizen with constitutional rights. We’re going to indict him. We’re going to charge him instead of treating him as an enemy combatant, as a terrorist. And so we’re totally blowing any opportunity to learn anything from this guy.
CALLER: One other thing and I’ll let you go.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: They’re talking about throwing the counterterrorism chief under the bus because he went back on the ski slope.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: But Obama went back on the golf course, and he’s the commander-in-chief; he’s the one that took the oath of office to protect this country, people, in terms of foreign and domestic enemies.
RUSH: Excellent point.
CALLER: What’s the difference?
RUSH: In fact, I agree with you. People are calling for Napolitano’s head over this same incident and people have properly pointed out, ‘Hey, she’s not the problem. The guy who put her there is the problem. The guy choosing all of these incompetents is the problem,’ and as you point out, the guy acting as though he’s inconvenienced by all this is the problem. Now, Michael Isikoff in Newsweek: ‘President Obama’s decision to suspend sending any detainees being held in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility back to Yemen was ‘politically, a no-brainer,’ a senior administration official tells NEWSWEEK. But the move will do more than complicate Obama’s commitment to shut down the base: it has raised new questions about whether the facility will be shuttered at all, at least in the first term of Obama’s presidency. ‘I’m beginning to think that Guantanamo is not ever going to be closed,’ says John Bellinger, the top State Department lawyer under former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and a persistent advocate of shutting down the facility. Given the current political obstacles, ‘I would bet some money that it’s not going to get closed in the Obama presidency.”
If I may — and I really don’t like doing this — but I must tell you, my friends, before Obama was inaugurated I said, ‘He’s not going to close Gitmo and he’s not going to get out of Iraq.’ And people said, ‘How do you know?’ And I said, ‘Because, no matter how they articulate their position on Iraq or Afghanistan or terrorism now, meaning during the Bush presidency, if they could saddle Bush with the defeat, if they could secure a premature pullout of Iraq so that they could say we lost, then they would do that but they’re not going to saddle themselves with what appears to be a military defeat. Even in Afghanistan, where Obama says he’s uncomfortable with victory, he’s still sending some troops. It may be for show but he’s not pulling out of there and he’s not pulling out of Iraq. And now he’s not going to get out of Gitmo. And I knew, I knew it, because I know these people. And this is going to really tick off the base. But big deal, where are they going to go? The radical leftists are not going to end up voting Republican ever but this is really going to tick ’em off.
In this Isikoff story, by the way, moving these guys, we’re going to send ’em to Yemen but we’re not because one in five of them, to get one in five, 20% of the people who have been released from Guantanamo Bay have rejoined terrorist groups, 20%. And people are surprised at this. I wonder why. What’s the recidivism rate when you let people out of prison? Do they go back to crime? A majority of them do. Most are not rehabbed. Most of them get back on the crime gravy train. Why should terrorists be any different? Well, the only reason you might think they wouldn’t go back and join terrorist groups is if you think they’re not terrorists in the first place. And if you are a radical, stupid leftist you might believe that because you might believe that Bush was just rounding up people that look like Middle Eastern types and put them in Guantanamo Bay because Bush is profiling and Bush is discriminating and Bush is playing cowboy and Bush is putting innocent people in jail and not charging them with anything, it’s an outrage, it’s violating our values and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We heard all of that.
So 20% of them go back to terrorism, and we’re shocked? The only way you could be shocked is if you thought they were just innocent little lambs in there and were illegally in prison and their human civil rights were being violated. But what Isikoff points out, now we’re going to send these people, some of them, to the Chicago prison. Speaking of that, we’re going to send these people to the Chicago prison, but if you read Isikoff’s story, sending them to that Illinois prison will do nothing to change their status. They are still going to be held there without being charged. So we’re just going to create Gitmo north so that Obama can save face. Closing Guantanamo Bay has nothing to do with anything substantive. They’re going to continue to say they’re closing it because it was Bush’s. And they survive, they thrive on the theory that everybody hated Bush and they have no desire to in any way, shape, manner, or form look like George W. Bush so they gotta close Gitmo.
In fact, the former attorney general, Mr. Mukasey, has a critique in the Wall Street Journal today about Obama’s handling of the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber. And here’s the conclusion: ‘What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as ‘war’ and ‘Islamist terrorism,’ and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us.’ And that’s too bad because the Constitution vests the executive power, not some of it, all of it, in the president. He and those acting at his direction are responsible for protecting us.
‘There is much to worry about if they think that the principal challenge of the day is detecting bombs at the airport rather than actively searching out, finding and neutralizing terrorists before they get there.’ And that is right on the money. So Mr. Mukasey thinks that they have such hatred for Bush, and they believe everybody else has such hatred for Bush that they are going to do anything to avoid looking like Bush, which means go soft on national security, go soft on prosecuting and treating terrorists as actual enemy combatants. So they’re probably not going to close Gitmo, we are going to move some people to Illinois to create jobs for Dick Durbin, but they’re still going to be up there uncharged, their status isn’t going to change.
Oh, and this, this is just delicious. This is from Founding Bloggers: ‘An Illinois state panel voted today in favor of letting Gov. Pat Quinn close a little-used prison in northwestern Illinois so the Obama administration can use it to hold terrorism suspects now held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Meanwhile, three federal prisoners escaped a downstate federal facility in Illinois today.’ Is that not just juicy? Illinois panel votes in favor of the Gitmo plan to bring some prisoners up to that prison in Thomson, Illinois, the same day that three federal prisoners escape a federal prison in southern Illinois.
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RUSH: And to make the point, the seven-page indictment of the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber, the Christmas bomber — the ‘Fruit of Kaboom Bomber’ I call it. In the seven-page indictment, the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism’ does not show up. Not once, not anywhere in the seven-page indictment.
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RUSH: This is Ken in Detroit. It’s nice to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Yeah. Good afternoon, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: I wanted to comment about the terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda here in Detroit on Christmas afternoon. I’ve been listening very closely to what President Obama has been saying about it and what the news media has been saying. When you consider that just about everything that has been suggested as far as changes that can be made having to do with airline safety would have absolutely nothing to do with preventing this attack, I am convinced that they are trying to use this as a smokescreen to redirect the attention of the American people away from what they’re trying to do as far as destroying our national health care. I really think that this is what Obama and the news media is trying to do. They want to focus on the attack in Detroit and keep people away from health care.
RUSH: Well, I don’t know that that’s gonna work. People are not cooled down over health care. They’re more revved up than ever about this because it has passed both houses and because it’s now being done in secret. There’s really nothing much to keep up with because it’s passed both houses. We don’t know what’s happening now because everything that’s being done to reconcile the two bills is done behind closed doors, which also ticks people off. Now, you’re right about… I was driving around the other day and I was listening to all these proposed changes that the Obama administration is going to make here regarding the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber. We’re going to intensify air marshals and we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that, and I had the same thought that you had.
‘None of that has any relationship to what happened here. What happened was a guy had a bunch of explosives in his underwear and it wasn’t caught.’ Air marshals are not going to help anything, especially if you know the guy’s on the airplane and you don’t tell the airplane. We knew the guy was on the flight and nobody told the pilots. I don’t know if there were air marshals on board, but as far as we know, they weren’t told. I don’t know… We’re going to beef up this and beef up that, and my first reaction is: ‘You mean we haven’t done all this, even after 9/11?’ So I think you have a point. One thing: I don’t think Bush was at all lackadaisical or incomplete in implementing security measures. TSA is what it is. It largely could be inefficient because they’re not allowed to actually focus on the most likely suspects. In fact, we have to ignore the most likely suspects in order to be politically correct.
Now we’re going to tighten up. We asked these airports across the country around the world tighten their security. Like Nigeria said, ‘Screw you! We’re not going to do this!’ They basically flipped Obama off. They said, ‘Screw you! It’s gonna harm our travel. It’s gonna put people at too great a strain. We don’t want any part of that.’ So I don’t doubt that they’d like to try to distract people from the health care business, but they’re not succeeding. Even the press is all over this eight different promises, eight different times Obama promised that the negotiations over health care would be televised. Brian Lamb is out there saying it’s only been one hour of all of this that has been televised.
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RUSH: I want you to hear something. We’ve got two sound bites here. This is number 19 and 20, Mike. This is Peter King yesterday afternoon on Fox Studio B with Shepard Smith. Now, they say Fox is biased, but Shep is an Obama apologist, and he’s got two hours. He’s got three to four and seven to eight p.m. They got an Obama apologist over there at Fox. I don’t know how they can say that Fox is biased. Peter King from Long Island was on talking about Gitmo. And Peter King said, ‘I think the president should end this race to close Guantanamo and realize that it’s sending a very mixed signal to the world and to our people in the field.’
SMITH: How is that sending a mixed signal? He campaigned on that, he’s been real firm on that. He said that gave us a black eye around the world, and studies seem to suggest that’s exactly what it did, and what difference does it make where you house them as long as they don’t get out?
KING: It makes a very big difference because right now we’ve no place to put them.
SMITH: Oh they’ll find a place to put them, Congressman.
KING: He wants to send them to Yemen, and obviously —
SMITH: They’re not going to do that. They’ve already said they’re not going to do that.
KING: Well, they were going to do it up until yesterday.
SMITH: They’re not now.
KING: Well, why was he even thinking about it for the last year? We should not be giving — and just because the terrorists say that Gitmo is a recruiting agent, so is our support of Israel. Does that mean we shouldn’t support Israel?
SMITH: You’re not equating the two are you, Congressman? I mean, truly, why is this political football being thrown around so much. In the middle of all this President Obama campaigned on this issue, and he said he was going to do it, he got elected, and now he’s going to do it.
KING: He’s wrong, and he should learn by his mistakes.
(cross-talk)
RUSH: And it continued here. Listen to the final 44 seconds of this.
SMITH: Why do we spend time even talking about it? Why do people care? I mean we’ve —
KING: Well, it’s very important. I’ll tell you why.
SMITH: In Cuba, we shoved them off to another country and stuck them on the end of an island and given the nation a black eye, if you believe — if you believe President Obama.
KING: No, Shepard, only a — I don’t believe him — I think only a person that’s incredibly naive would say that we got — that we deserve that black eye. We got it because elements in the media and elements in the Democratic Party kept parroting that line.
SMITH: [in disgust]: Ugh.
KING: But the fact is they’re being treated [with] extreme humaneness at Guantanamo. It was the right thing to do and there were constitutional reasons for doing it and legal reasons for doing it, all of which, I think, have been proven right. You have to keep them in a place where they can be interrogated, where information can be gotten from them, intelligence gotten from them. We have the right to keep them there as long as we want to, I believe.
RUSH: Now, let me ask you people a question. Very simple. If we gave our nation a black eye by housing terrorists at Club Gitmo, if we gave our nation a black eye in the Arab world, then what the hell is Illinois going to become? What the hell different does it make where you put them? I’ll answer Shepard Smith’s question. What difference does it make where you put them? Then why not leave them there? If we have a black eye, if we are disrespected and unloved because we put some terrorists in a prison, then why the hell does it matter where the prison is? If we have a black eye ’cause we put innocent little children — see, that’s what they want us to believe. None of these people are guilty, and we haven’t charged them! We’re violating their human rights! Well, we’re going to violate their human rights in Illinois, too, because they’re going to have no status change. They’re still not going to be charged with anything. So if we gave ourselves a black eye by opening Guantanamo, and, by the way, that’s not a target, they can’t hit that, but they can sure as hell hit a prison in Illinois or Chicago. This is stupid all the way around to simply say Obama said he’s gonna do it and he’s gonna do it. Stupid!