Friday, January 08, 2010

The country is in the very best of hands, as Dr. Reynolds says

I don’t see how one can decide what we should do without first understanding what happened in this case. And some of what little is in the summary about the event seemed obscure or potentially misleading. For example, after stating that Abdulmutallab’s explosive device “did not explode, but instead ignited,” the summary states:

The flight crew restrained Mr. Abdulmutallab and the plane safely landed.

Am I to conclude that the accounts of passenger heroics are not true? Or is it just the reluctance of the administration or the intelligence community to give proper credit to anyone who is not paid to protect us?

Some accounts suggest that one or more passengers not only subdued the bomber, but prevented detonation. On the other hand, I seem to recall reading other (at least superficially persuasive) accounts suggesting that the bomb would not have exploded, just burned, because to be effective the components would have to be under pressure (which they weren’t). The summary is silent on this score, but I was hoping to learn the truth: Would the bomb have exploded without intervention?

I missed that part of the speech, but it fits right in with some of the other criticisms I've heard.

And that's a good question: Are they saying that the passengers, including the one who was reported to have climbed over seats and so forth, didn't actually do those things? Or is it another case of "They weren't experts and professionals, so anything they did doesn't count" from the bureaucrats? And if the latter, why the hell would the President so denigrate the actions of the passengers by ignoring them this way?

Add to that mess, this idiocy:
Over the past couple of weeks, the PA leadership has
repeatedly lauded Fatah terrorists and their acts of murder. Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad have personally engaged in the celebrations. This finally provoked the Israeli PM’s office to protest to the Americans that

the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are engaging in incitement by honoring a woman responsible for the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history, and calling the men who killed Rabbi Meir Avshalom Chai last month martyrs. …

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy director, Ron Dermer, said in response that “those Palestinian terrorists are murderers, not martyrs. We expect the PA to prepare the Palestinian people to live in peace with Israel and not glorify killers and name public squares after them.”

What was Mitchell’s reaction? Could he muster the kind of moral outrage that the Obama administration routinely reserves, say, for Jewish housing construction in Jerusalem? Well, no. He went on the Charlie Rose show and lauded Fayyad as an “impressive leader” and declared that the Fayyad-Abbas team represents “strong and effective leadership for the Palestinian people.” This will not end well.
Yeah, 'strong and effective leaders' for people who like murdering Jews and hate us. Friggin' wonderful.

And, just to pile it on, read this over at Ace on "Dots? What dots? What connections?"

1 comment:

Windy Wilson said...

I'm not surprised that the passengers' actions have gone down the memory hole, because, among other things, if it is admitted that untrained and unarmed "civilian" passengers can prevent the miscreant from re-igniting his bomb, that is strong evidence that armed civilians might be effective in other areas of security as well.
Can't have the sheep discovering the value of their own teeth and hooves.