Why collect so much information and then refuse to use it against terrorists?

Joel Pollack asks the right question: Why collect so much information if Obama refuses to use it against terror?

Russian intelligence had contacted the U.S. and warned our government directly about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The FBI interviewed him directly and decided to close the file. How would more information have helped stop the Boston Marathon bombing when the law enforcement agencies that had been provided information did not or could not act?

On Sep. 11, 2012, President Barack Obama was informed that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was under attack. Warning signs had been detected by U.S. intelligence but had been ignored. And yet even when told about the live threat to U.S. diplomats, President Obama failed to act and the directors of several national security agencies failed even to speak to each other that night. How would more information have helped?

A correspondent to Breitbart News writes in frustration: “The FBI and NSA were reading [Nidal] Hassan’s emails to [Anwar] Al Awlaki and monitoring his phone calls and didn’t think he was a threat at Ft. Hood. The FBI was also monitoring the phone calls of the Times Square bomber and didn’t do anything. So much for the value of phone call and email monitoring.

The problem is that President Obama does not want to believe that radical Islam is at war with us.

Kimberly Strassel observes of the IRS scandal–which now seems almost quaint in the context of Verizon and Prism–that President Obama set the tone from the beginning with vicious rhetorical attacks on conservative non-profit groups and their donors, calling them “a threat to our democracy.” Meanwhile, the Obama administration missed real threats–blind to the danger its own behavior poses to our democratic republic.