The Obama administration hardly has a perfect anti-terrorism record. Start with the mass murder at Fort Hood. But Time magazine wants to pretend that never happened, even though it was a Time cover story (which didn't want to call Nidal Malik Hasan a terrorist). Their February 21 edition carries a gushy profile headlined “Just Don't Call Him Lucky. Antiterrorism czar John Brennan is Obama's secret weapon.” (The online version is abridged.) Michael Crowley never uses the words "Fort Hood" in the piece. But look at this:
John Brennan's portfolio covers a hair-raising spectrum of horribles, including everything from cyberattacks to earthquakes and pandemics. But the top priority of the White House's top adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism is the continuing threat of radical Islamists who have mounted a series of attacks on the U.S. during President Barack Obama's tenure that came close to killing countless innocents.
Terrorists "came close" to murder, but never succeeded? Crowley later avoided Fort Hood again by touting that "al-Qaeda hasn't successfully struck the U.S under his watch." This is shameless:
To some critics, these near misses are evidence that America's defenses are not strong enough. "We cannot depend on dumb luck, incompetent terrorists and alert citizens to keep our families safe," then-Senator Kit Bond, a Republican, complained last May. But nothing shakes Brennan from his calm quite like the word luck. The U.S. has severely weakened al-Qaeda's ability to recruit and train, he argues. "And so what comes out of that pipeline, I think, is a much less capable, much less expert terrorist. If their underwear doesn't explode the way it's supposed to, it's not just because the guy was incompetent. It's because the training he got, the person who provided him the IED, the materials that went into it — all were less efficient, less suitable to the challenge. I take strong issue with somebody saying, 'They're just lucky,'" Brennan says. "That's bulls__. And I rarely ever curse."
To Crowley, it didn't seem to matter that Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas Day bomber, had evaded America's defenses. All that seemed to matter to him is that Brennan burned the midnight oil in response. He oozed sympathy:
On Christmas Day in 2009, Brennan was cooking dinner when he got a call reporting that a Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane with explosives sewn into his underwear. Brennan worked through New Year's Day. "Its impossible to have downtime. It's just the nature of the work," he says. The hours take their toll: "He was dead tired the last time I saw him," says a friend.
