OPINION:
Mike Pompeo, former secretary of State under Donald Trump’s administration, said in an interview that the Joe Biden White House should know by now whether the glitch that grounded America’s airlines on Wednesday — for the first time since September 11, 2001, by the way — came by way of technological problems or purposeful cyberattack.
Pete? Calling Pete Buttigieg?
The fate of the country’s national security is resting in the ability of Buttigieg to figure this out. But apparently, America’s leading Transportation figure got all tired out criticizing and condemning Southwest for its failed computerized systems that left thousands of passengers stranded and stuck over the holidays — and now he has little steam left to talk about his own leadership issues.
“[There were] irregularities in the messages that were going out [overnight] that reflected a bigger systems issue,” Buttigieg told CNN. “[By morning] there were still problems validating that the messages were going out.”
So the FAA grounded the planes, he said. Put another way: The Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Mission system suffered an outage that caused the immediate halting of all flights into and out of America.
Hmm. Well and good. But we still don’t know why the there were problems with the system. And Buttigieg’s explanations aren’t helpful. Even mainstream media sources can’t cover that basic truth.
“Why FAA’s compute system failed still unclear, as flights begin to normalize,” Politico just reported.
It’s the not knowing that’s not soothing. And it can’t be helped but to look to a previous administration’s time and wonder at the differences in leadership.
Question to Pompeo: Should we know by now if this systems’ failure was due to technological failure or something more nefarious — something like a cyberattack?
Answer from Pompel: “My experience when there were attacks from abroad there was a already tell-tale sign, almost always, some footprint, something to suggest that this wasn’t just somebody flipped a switch that shouldn’t have been flipped or a piece of code that was written improperly. It was usually in very short order. Now we are 12, 14, 16 hours on — it [should be] pretty apparent [if] there was an external system that drove the failure or something from inside and they should, I would think, have the answer to that.”
By comparison — answer from Buttigieg.
“Now we have to understand how this happened in the first place,” he told CNN.
“[There’s] no direct evidence” of a cyberattack, he told CNN.
“[But] we are also not going to rule that out until we have a better understanding of what’s taken place,” he told CNN.
Crickets. We need new leadership.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
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