Andrew Sullivan really, really wants President Obama to fire someone to demonstrate his seriousness about fighting terrorism following an attempt to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day. There's no question that failures in intelligence sharing led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a plane headed for Detroit with explosives secreted on his person. But firing someone immediately won't make the U.S safer -- it would even be more detrimental to U.S. safety.
Should Dennis Blair get the ax, as director of national intelligence? How about Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano? Homeland Security Adviser John Brennan, for failing to ensure that intelligence coordination was moved quickly enough? Sure, Napolitano goofed with her gaffe that the "system worked," but Blair is in charge of all intelligence, and Brennan is supposed to manage the interagency process. The problem with interagency coordination, though, is that it is hard to blame the head of one Cabinet department; it's also hard to sack more than one senior official at once without chaos. Plus, think of how long it will take, in today's Senate, to replace any of these people. We could fire the head of the Transportation Security Agency, which certified both airports Abdulmutallab traveled through as up-to-snuff in their security procedures, but there is no head of the TSA because his appointment was being held up in the Senate.
What about the middle managers who failed to pass along this information? Richard Clarke thinks its likely that mistakes were made by a number of low-level people at the CIA and other agencies; perhaps they should lose their jobs. But we don't yet know who exactly those people are. Of course, any firings at the CIA would likely result in more moaning about agency morale and how Obama is ruining our intelligence services.
Sullivan likes Obama more than George W. Bush because where Bush was impulsive, his successor is rational. And yet, just over a week after an attack that we're still trying to understand, Sullivan wants someone fired, trumpeting "As Usual, No Accountability." He doesn't seem to care who gets fired, or have a rationale for why a firing would improve security. He just wants some symbolic action in response to an attack that didn't even succeed. That sounds like same old same old to me. Obama should figure out what actually went wrong, and then determine if one or more officials were responsible, and fire them. More important, if the failure was systemic, he needs to make sure that someone is in place to be accountable next time.
-- Tim Fernholz
