No Immediate Firings Expected Over Intel Failures

[Purveyor]

Source: Associated Press

The White House is not expected to announce the firing of any officials over intelligence failures — for now anyway — as President Barack Obama prepares to tell the nation more about a botched terrorist attack over Detroit and what else he will do to beef up security.

Eager to fix a glaring breakdown in intelligence sharing and get the incident behind him, Obama will speak Thursday about a declassified account of the near catastrophe on Christmas Day. The White House also plans to release a copy of the report with some detail stripped away for security reasons.

U.S. officials say a 23-year-old Nigerian man with ties to al-Qaida tried to detonate an explosive device aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was indicted Wednesday on charges of attempted murder and other crimes. His father had warned U.S. officials of his extremist ties but that threat was never identified fully by intelligence officials, a breakdown that has drawn intense, candid criticism from the president himself.

It remains unclear whether any top officials from Obama's not-quite-year-old administration will eventually lose their jobs over the debacle. No one lost their job or was censured after the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people nine years ago in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.

"I don't know what the final outcome in terms of hiring and firing will be," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.




Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/01/06/national/w155301S01.DTL#ixzz0bshnGtd0

[Raven]

1. Good. To me it means that Obama is going to wait and find out what really went wrong.

[napi21]

2. Richard Woolff (sp) was on Keith's show last night talking about this.

He said you won't see a mass firing, that's not Obama's style. You will see the slower but deliberate moving out of anyone who failed. I agree with that. I like Obama's style. He's not playing into the hands of the media who LOVE a "guilty guy who's just been kicked out". He researches the issue, and takes action quietly, and that's the way it should be.

[bemildred]

3. I would think the prospect of getting your ass blown up would be an incentive for reform anyway. nt

[BlueJac]

4. it is all bullshit anyway

we are a lost country for sure