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Five Things To Watch At Obama's Terror Meeting
Hit for being too slow and diffident in his initial response to the Christmas Day terror plot, President Barack Obama is hoping for a do-over Tuesday — summoning his security chiefs to the White House to explain what went wrong.
The session in the Situation Room is Obama’s first chance to go face to face with those responsible for securing the nation and a big opportunity to set the tone and tempo for the government’s response to the terror plot against Northwest Flight 253.
A senior administration official said: "There was an attempted act of terrorism on Christmas Day, and the president is meeting with his national security team to discuss the reviews that he ordered immediately thereafter."
The White House is giving no sign Obama will ask anyone to take the fall for intelligence and security failures that led to the near disaster. But the White House is trying to project an air of decisive action by the president, on an issue where the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“This calls for a really hard look,” Georgetown University professor Bruce Hoffman said. “Not putting in place measures to prevent the recurrence — the failure to do that is political suicide. …I’m not sure that kind of threshold would have applied after the Sept. 11 attacks, but it would now.”
Here are five things to watch for around Tuesday’s meeting:
1. Will heads roll?
Obama already tried to recover from his first response, a somewhat tepid statement three days after the attack, with stern comments last Tuesday in which he blasted the U.S. government’s failure to head off the terrorist attack as “totally unacceptable.” He made it sound like careers were on the line, saying he would insist on “accountability at every level.”
To be sure, there was a pre-emptive element to Obama’s comments. He was trying to make sure even his most strident critics didn’t sound angrier about any breaches than he was.
Some pressed for the dismissal of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for seeming to minimize the failures in her first interviews, when she suggested “the system worked.” However, Obama and other officials have since gone out of their way to praise her.
An oddly timed statement Saturday from the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, had intelligence types wondering if he was about to go.
Now, some 10 days after the attempted bombing, insiders are increasingly doubtful that Obama will sack anyone.
In appearances on the Sunday talk shows, Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan dodged questions about firings. “What the president wants to do is to make sure that we're able to take the corrective steps necessary to prevent this from happening again. But he needs to hold everybody accountable, including me,” Brennan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Given that Brennan is leading the White House’s review and will make a presentation at Tuesday’s meeting, many intelligence and homeland security watchers took that comment as a sign that, in this instance, holding people accountable would not mean dismissals.
The deaths of seven CIA officers last week and the sagging morale over torture investigations make it unlikely that Obama would turn to Langley to set an example.
A White House official said Obama will use his remarks Tuesday to outline the review's "findings and an initial series of reforms to improve our watch-listing system as well as our ability to thwart future attempts to carry out terrorist attacks." FBI Director Robert Mueller will update the president on the terror investigation, and Attorney General Eric Holder will update him on the prosecution of the suspect.
2. Will it be Dr. Obama or Mr. Hyde?
The president’s uneven reaction to the attempted Christmas Day attack — from three days of silence to a tempered statement to visible anger — raises the question of which Obama will show up when he speaks publicly after Tuesday’s meeting.
Will it be the measured Obama who, in his first remarks on the incident, said he was “closely monitoring” the situation? That Obama can seem aloof, an approach supporters say reflects his fact-based approach to problem solving but might not reflect the anger many Americans feel toward a planned terror attack that could have cost the lives of more than 200 people on a U.S. airliner.
Or will the president step it up and deliver more sternly worded remarks, as he did last Tuesday?
Some felt Brennan was trying to turn down the temperature a few degrees with his comments Sunday insisting that the foul-up was not like Sept. 11 and didn’t involve officials deliberately sitting on information.
“I certainly noticed the change in tone,” one former intelligence official said.
The White House, still wary of the backlash from its initial response, is likely to keep Obama’s tone sharp and forward leaning. Action will be the watchword.
3. Will Obama assist vigorous investigations by Congress?
Every day seems to bring another announcement by a congressional committee that it will probe the Christmas Day attack. The Intelligence, Judiciary and Homeland Security committees are all teeing up hearings.
Obama has sought to make a public break with what many perceived as the Bush administration’s disdain for congressional oversight, but even Obama has resisted involvement from Congress at times. He was cool to hearings about Bush administration interrogation policies and wouldn’t allow his social secretary to testify in hearings on how intruders made it into a state dinner. But administration officials have so far shown signs of cooperation with the Hill on the attempted terror attack.
Denis McDonough, the National Security Council chief of staff, said last week that the White House welcomes the hearings even though they will overlap with the administration’s own reviews of how a 23-year-old Nigerian man with extremist ties got onto an airplane with explosives.
“I think it's important that Congress be involved in making sure that the government is doing all it can,” McDonough said. “We obviously think it's a good opportunity to get to the bottom of all of this.”
The White House has been less clear about whether administration officials, specifically Brennan, will testify.
“Boy, that gets into a — I don't think that generally,” McDonough said, struggling to find the answer when asked if Brennan would testify. McDonough then suggested that will depend on the precedent for national security officials giving congressional testimony.
4. Does the long-simmering Panetta vs. Blair fight resurface?
Through most of last year, CIA Director Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, have been locked in a simmering turf war over who controls the nation’s spying, at foreign outposts or through covert operations.
The battles got only a smattering of press coverage, but they were serious, so much so that Vice President Joe Biden and National Security Adviser Jim Jones were brought in to referee (and sided with the CIA on some key points).
Now the Christmas Day plot is pushing some of the skirmishing to the fore, as the inner workings of the intelligence community come under intense scrutiny. It might force the Obama administration to settle once and for all an agency question the prior administration never truly did — who is the nation’s spymaster, Panetta or Blair?
“Five years after the DNI position was created …what is this person’s role in the intelligence architecture?” Georgetown's Hoffman asked. “He has no role over the budget, cannot enforce his priorities, cannot hire and fire. …After this incident, these questions are being asked a lot more sharply.”
5. How far will the White House go in profiling?
As a senator, Obama sponsored legislation to end racial, ethnic and religious profiling. However, the Transportation Security Administration announced a new policy Sunday to require extra screening of all air travelers who are citizens of 14 designated countries (13 of which are largely Muslim), and the policy is already under attack as a violation of civil liberties.
“This is discrimination based on national origin,” complained Nawar Shora of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “That’s poor law enforcement. …I’m a bit surprised that this comes out of the Obama administration. I don’t know if he approved it, but it’s still under his watch.”
“Adding another crude system that just targets everyone from these countries is going to be ineffective, and it’s going to hurt the larger U.S. interest in a struggle that requires keeping and winning friends as well as deterring enemies,” said Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The TSA has insisted that it “does not profile” and that “security measures are based on threat, not ethnic or religious background.”
Some of Obama’s supporters will be looking closely to see if he takes ownership of the new rules in his statement Tuesday and how he justifies them.
Sources: Politico, MSNBC
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