Rush Holt Telling It Like It Is...Again!!!

".......Our country confronts an implacable and dispersed al Qaeda threat, and the tools of war have proved ineffective against it. This is not to minimize the strength or the viciousness of the threat. We are fighting a pernicious idea that is motivating people like Abdulmutallab. The tools of war are not what would have stopped Abdulmutallab. It is vigilance. (As it happened, it was the vigilance and courage of civilians on the plane who thwarted the act, because the official agents had not been vigilant enough.) We won't defeat the idea with Hellfire missiles, whether in the Afghanistan border areas or in Yemen, missiles which too frequently can miss their intended targets and kill others. And even if they hit the target it is a Pyrrhic victory. I have lost count of how many times we have heard that the al Qaeda Number 3 has been killed.... See More

Do not misunderstand; this is not just a polite clash of ideas. It is deadly and deadly serious. We need our intelligence and law enforcement communities to gather information about radical movements, identify training, penetrate cells, disrupt, discredit, and eliminate those who would harm Americans and innocents anywhere. But most of the work necessarily is unglamorous, meticulous watching and analyzing. Prior to 2001, too much of the thinking in intelligence agencies had been the Cold War spy-versus-spy maneuvering and now too much of it is the warfighting mentality that replaced it over the past eight years. The failure to share information in 2001 was that the intelligence community was still in the Cold War mentality. The failure to share information this month was that the intelligence community had replaced the Cold War mentality with a warfighting one. If the focus is on "kinetic action" it shapes how you evaluate and value information. How irrelevant the movements of disciples of an extremist must seem when the focus is on assassinating him. How unimportant the denial of a visa must seem if what really counts is warfighting. A watchlist takes on less importance at an airport if the purpose of it is thought to be identifying an assassination target on a distant frontier rather than sidetracking a would-be bomber.

It is Cheney, not President Obama, who has misdiagnosed the problem and gotten us off track."