The System Worked?

While being interviewed by a CNN reporter, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano stated that "The system worked". Really? The system worked? How is it that 23 year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, identified as being tied to terrorists, got on a plane bound for Detroit? How is it that he was identified as being tied to terrorists was allowed to keep a US visa? How is it that he was not allowed to enter the UK but was allowed to board a plane bound for the US?

If you ask Janet Napolitano, she'll tell you that there are too many people on too many lists to be able to identify the real threats. Well, if I took my 4 year old PC and took all the names on all the lists they had, it would take me about 15 milliseconds to find a name on one of them.

Maybe she didn't have the guts to admit that the system failed terribly. Maybe she wasn't able to think quick enough to come up with an excuse that would have sufficed her office and the President. Well, she just made her look incompetent, the Department of Homeland Security look like buffoons, and President Obama look like he he made a real bad choice in picking the head of Homeland Security.

She went on to say that the system worked because there was no information to think that a person banned from entering Great Britain, identified as being tied to a terror group, named by his father as a potential threat, posed no risk to any passenger on any flight bound for the US. I guess it is much easier to put a deadbeat dad on the no-fly list than a known terrorist link.

Janet Napolitano also said that the system worked because all the security personnel, airline employees and the passengers all took the necessary steps to take control of the situation. In case I have not been told, but when boarding a flight, I was never told that I was a part of the Homeland Security procedures of stopping terrorism. Was I given my junior Homeland Security badge? Was I given training on how to tackle a person with a failed explosive device in his groin? Was I told to be the person that tackles any person that wishes jihad when lighting a PETN explosive?

I sure hope that Janet Napolitano will rethink her statement and clarify that she meant it was terribly broken and that she misspoke to everyone watching that interview. Maybe she meant the system worked just after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was detained and arrested in a Detroit hospital when he suffered 3rd degree burns from his failed explosive. If there is a single reporter that has the ability to stand up to her and have her clarify how, by the shear luck and grace of God that the bomber failed to assemble the bomb correctly, the "system" made anybody on that flight safer, I'd like to see it.

It looks to me that after 28 failed attempts to kill Americans by terrorists, the "system" is working with a big handful of luck and that if we didn't have God looking over us, we would have had a few more deaths by terrorists and a few less interviews by flunky appointees that cannot dare say a single thing bad about this failed administration.