Who Then?

President Harry Truman said it when he claimed for himself the distinctively ugly responsibility of authorizing the dropping of Atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and he will be forever immortalized as the person who struggled and lost his own inner conflict on unleashing mass destruction on an hitherto-unknown scale on innocent civilians - because he could. Now Barack Obama has repeated that declaration of sole responsibility, but to other purposes.

While what President Truman accepted was responsibility for what he was on the cusp of permitting through his executive authority, President Obama has accepted responsibility for his administration's woeful lack of due diligence. Both were in the process of defending America. One did so at tremendous cost of human life to another, belligerent country. The other has done so in defence of those arms of government tasked with protecting the country. And failing, spectacularly, if we ease back to 9/11.

So what precisely - or even imprecisely - does it mean to claim that the buck stops with him? Obviously, that he is the prime authority and with him rests the means by which greater, more effective measures will be activated in security of his country - and by extension, other countries around the world presumably. Having said which, how to account for the immeasurably lacklustre performance to date? Nothing now comes out of the blue, after all.

Despite the vaunted capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, their lack of awareness, preparedness, communication, capabilities and interaction with other, international security agencies have revealed their amazing level of ineptitude. Blaring klaxons, and bright strobe lights all indicating trouble were simply ignored.

Revealing a deep-seated, deeply engrained problem of laxity, despite the gravity of the issue. That of exerting every level of security to the singular purpose of working together purposefully and determinedly to enable anticipating the plans, moves and targets that a cunningly vicious enemy would chose to undertake to impress upon its target the level of its investment in bloody religious-inspired warfare.

What makes this botched operation so mind-bogglingly unbelievable is not that one glaring indicator was overlooked, but an entire series of them. Fragments of data, along with impressively urgent warnings when placed in context should have placed the country on high alert, responsive and ready to isolate imminent threats. And none of this occurred. At any level. From the placing of the suspect's name on the correct list of threats, to vigilance in recognizing a clearly emerging picture of a suicide bomber.

"It was a failure to connect and integrate and understand the intelligence we had. We didn't follow up and prioritize the steam of intelligence indicating that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike our homeland because no one intelligence entity or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow up investigation. The intelligence fell through the cracks."

President Obama states the obvious. But more than that, he identifies the gross incompetence of the entire security machinery. In point of fact, why would any 'entity or team or task force' be assigned responsibility for doing that follow up investigation to begin with? Why would it not be automatically assumed by each of those 'intelligence entity or team or task force' that it was incumbent upon each to assume responsibility?

And then to competently inform the other branches so they assume a collective front to penetrate their assailants' plans and apprehend them.