Awake and Alert

Today marks the sixty-eighth anniversary of the day the cat jumped, that date that "will live in infamy" as FDR so rightly declared. So where are we (the United States) today when it comes to being caught with our guard down? We are nearly as unprepared as we were on December 7, 1941 or September 11, 2001- our two great national security disasters, both of which, had intelligence been read correctly, could have been averted. Our Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just declared this very weekend that "we have no good intelligence on the location of Osama bin Laden", in fact, despite rewards available in the many millions and great national resources devoted to finding him, that we have not had actionable intelligence on the arch terrorist in years. And this is not the largest part of the security deficiency as it exists today. Our failure to screen jet cargo, lack of screeners at ports, lax security around chemical and nuclear sites are not the worst of the lapses either. The glaring dangers are complacency, that permits all the aforementioned problems to continue, along with re-imposition by the Obama administration of the pre-9/11 mindset, complete with regarding the war as a criminal issue and re-inititating some of the barriers to intelligence sharing that were started by the Clinton administration to further criminal prosecutions of those who should be regarded as enemy combatants and not afforded Constitutional protections and due process rights. This, coupled with political correctness, that absolves clear motive of jihad from events such as the Fort Hood massacre and the recent murder of Professor Richard Antoun at Binghamton University, shows we are no longer serious about naming the enemy as expansionist political Islam as manifested in worldwide jihad including attacks directed against the homeland. The last President Bush never fully embraced the concept of "the religion of peace" as the enemy, but Obama has kowtowed altogether, singling our ally Israel out for opprobrium and in so doing, feeding the flames of jihad and contrary to what Obama intends, making peace less, not more likely, causing both Arabs and Israelis to dig in their heels. The United States after Pearl Harbor should have been ever vigilant, but we are once again blinded by the veils of political correctness and complacency.