Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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A Certain Attack

Rich Galen

Wednesday February 3, 2010

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President Barak Obama is working as hard as he can to re-invent himself as a man o' the people who is worried about jobs on Main Street, about bonuses on Wall Street, and about lobbyists on K Street.

Maybe he is. But meanwhile the rest of the world, especially that part of the rest of the world which is trying to destroy us, is hard at work, trying to destroy us.

I know you remember the well-deserved scorn and derision (if not outright dread) at the way in which the President and his hand-picked band of anti-terror experts handled the tighty-whitey-bomber on Christmas Day and its immediate aftermath.

We didn't know quite how immediate was the handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab by the Obama Administration until later when we found out he had been read his Miranda rights after 50 minutes which also included medical attention for his burned � area and, for all we know, a nice mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich with the mutton being nice and lean.

Those of us who are pre-disposed to look for minor errors in the way Mr. Obama has gone about trying to figure out this whole confusing President thing for the past 54 weeks were taken to task by our friends on the Left for jumping on the way the Abdulmutallab incident was handled.

As you shake your head sadly over how I have become a tool of the Right, consider an essay by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen which appeared yesterday morning.

Mr. Cohen is anything but a tool of the Right. It would not surprise me to find that he has trained himself to be left-handed just so the word "right" never has to enter his vocabulary. Nevertheless his column was titled:

Obama Administration is Tone-Deaf to
Concerns About Terrorism

Yikes!

The opening of Cohen's piece read thus:

There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer."

Go back and read it again �

Sounds like � Dick Cheney, doesn't it?

Cohen points to Abdulmutallab having been read his rights "after just 50 minutes of interrogation and he, having probably seen more than his share of 'Law & Order' episodes, promptly shut up."

He also writes about the non-witted decision (apparently by Attorney General Eric Holder) to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City which would have had the effect of

"cordoning off much of Lower Manhattan and placing a security perimeter around the financial district, not only costing something like $200 million a year but also would destroy the economy of the area [giving] KSM, as he is called, a second shot at devastating downtown New York."

And, on the Obama plan to close Guantanamo:

"It is now apparent that there are some bad people there who should be detained way past the time they are eligible for AARP membership."

Then, as if to add to my sense of impending doom, it was reported by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and others last night that,

"The U.S.'s top intelligence officials said Tuesday that an attempted al Qaeda attack on the U.S. in the next three to six months was 'certain.'"

"Certain?" That's a long way from "probable." And light years away from "possible."

The officials were testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which includes, as a senior Member, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.

SIDEBAR

Reading the name "Rockefeller" and the word "Intelligence" in the same sentence never fails to make me chuckle.

END SIDEBAR

Obama may not be able to protect us against an al Qaeda attack over the next three to six months, but that appears to be an intelligence success compared to what America's head spy, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, told the committee about our "inability" to deal with nearly constant cyber-attacks. In his written statement Blair said:

"Sensitive information is stolen daily from both government and private sector networks, undermining confidence in our information systems, and in the very information these systems were intended to convey.
"We often find persistent, unauthorized, and at times, unattributable presences on exploited networks, the hallmark of an unknown adversary intending to do far more than merely demonstrate skill or mock a vulnerability."

And what is President Obama doing about that?

Running around the country trying to make us forget we're at war.

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to the Richard Cohen column as well as the WSJ and CNN coverage of the Intelligence Committee testimony yesterday.

Also, a Mullfoto which I am taking much more seriously since I wrote this column and a Catchy Caption of the Day which will make you scratch your head, if you can get to it.

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