Is Homeland Security Too Large or Incompetent?

We ask that question because there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer with this Obama Administration. We were part of the group that from Day One didn't think it was a good idea to put all the agencies under one head because you could get an Administration that would appoint someone that couldn't handle the job. That didn't take long as Obama appointed former Arizona Governor Napolatono to head Homeland Security. Her rhetoric has always been more then her actions and it looks like that is still true today. Only good thing to come out of that appointment was the citizens of Arizona didn't have to continue to have her as Governor which was a plus.

After the recent terrorist event that almost brought down a Northwest Airlines plane, the President comes out 'after' he got back from his vacation and declared the Intelligence Community didn't do a good job of understanding what they were reading. Yet, he is firing no one.

Looks to us that since all the agencies were brought under Homeland Security it has become more dysfunctional under the current Secretary of Homeland Security Napolatono. Her first reaction to the attempted terrorist attack was that all the systems worked which was far from the truth. The people Obama and Napolatono have put in charge are not seasoned intelligence people but are people who received a political appointment as a payoff for their support of Obama. CIA Director Panetta was nothing more then a lawyer who was always defending Clinton and his Administration especially in front of the cameras. Now he is the CIA Director?

No wonder the Democrats in Congress didn't want John Bolton as the UN Ambassador. He should have been put in charge of the State Department to actually make it work unlike the dysfunctional place it is today and getting worse under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Clinton seems more interested in traveling around the World instead of cleaning up the State Department and making it a functioning organization. The State Department is in charge of visas which they cannot seem to handle if this latest terrorist incident is any indication. Clinton is the person who gave Russia a reset button on US/Russia relations which was tacky to say the least.

This idea of putting people in jobs with no experience has turned into a nightmare and even then Obama won't fire a soul. He refuses now to meet with the media and let them ask questions while he also whitewashed the security report on the airline bomber. We are still waiting for the shock we were promised.

Since Obama wanted to grade himself, we would like to give our grade of his handling of national security which he ignored to try and get Obamacare passed at all costs. We believe he deserves an "F" as he has played up to our enemies and dissed our allies. Then he decided to do away with the War on Terror and declare it an overseas contingency. That doesn't even account for bringing terrorist into the criminal judicial system where a judge recently threw out a lot of evidence already on one of the terrorist. Then the DOJ decided to charge the airplane bomber so he quit talking.

Thinking about it, this whole administration deserves that "F" grade for failure on national security.

Interagency gaps let bomb suspect retain visa

Bush adviser says system OK, but 'lack of focus' is to blame
By Nicholas Kralev

U.S. visa-revocation procedures broke down in a welter of interagency uncertainty in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a failure that current and former officials say allowed the Nigerian Islamist known to U.S. intelligence to board an airliner with a homemade bomb on Christmas Day.

However, the visa shortcomings were not the main focus of President Obama's recent comments on the security and intelligence failures related to the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

"The system isn't broken, but what failed fundamentally in this case was the lack of focus on the potential threat threads tied to attack-planning directed at the United States," said Juan Zarate, who was a counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush. He is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"That's not a technological problem — this was a failure of forcing the existing system to concentrate on the potential reality of that threat," he said.

While some critics blame the State Department, which has full authority to cancel visas without permission from other agencies, others say the intelligence community should have recommended revocation based on information it had — but the State Department did not.

John R. Bolton, who in the Bush administration was undersecretary of state for international security and later ambassador to the United Nations, said the "allocation of responsibilities on visas between [the Departments of] State, Homeland Security and [the National Counterterrorism Center] has not worked out, although different people blame different agencies."

Mr. Obama conceded that an interagency problem exists when he said Thursday that he had directed "our embassies and consulates to include current visa information in their warnings of individuals with terrorist or suspected terrorist ties."

Excerpt: Read More at Washington Times