On Christmas day, December 25, 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a native of Nigeria, boarded Northwest Flight 253 in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. He was able to conceal an explosive device consisting, in part, of approximately 80 grams of PETN. PETN was widely used in the plastic explosives terrorists used to blow up airplanes in the 1970s and 1980s.
Abdulmutallab’s family in Nigeria maintains that his father, prominent Nigerian banker Alhaji Umar Mutallab, had reached out to Nigerian security agencies two months ago. The father next approached foreign security agencies for "their assistance to find and return him home.”
Last month his father, reported his concerns to the American Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria. The father was worried that his son was in Yemen and "had fallen under the influence of religious extremists." The embassy visit by Abdulmatallab’s father triggered a Nov. 20 State Department cable from Lagos, Nigeria to all U.S. diplomatic missions and department headquarters in Washington. It was also shared with the interagency National Counter Terrorism Center.
As a result, Abdulmutallab was listed along with about 550,000 names in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, known as TIDE. TIDE is maintained by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. There are other, smaller lists that trigger additional airport screening or other restrictions, but intelligence officials have said they did not have enough information to move him onto one of these more targeted lists.
Further, Britain refused to grant Abdulmutallab a student visa in May 2009. Unfortunately, there was no apparent effort to revoke his U.S. tourist visa, issued in June 2008 and good for multiple entries over two years.
On December 27, two days after the NWA 253 incident, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was making the rounds on the Sunday morning news shows. On each of these shows, the host asked several reasonable and penetrating questions. These are questions the public deserves answers to. Questions such as: “Why was Abdulmutallab not already placed on a ‘Do Not Fly’ list or, at a minimum, a list which triggers additional screening when boarding an aircraft?” or “Why was he able to board an aircraft with 80 grams of PETN hidden on his body?”
Secretary Napolitano offered little by way of real explanation. Her response, repeated during many interviews on Sunday, was “The system worked.” or “The system has worked very, very smoothly.” The Secretary was widely criticized for her superficial response. Her answers (spin) to important questions suggested that the Department of Homeland Security simply did NOT have a system that worked.
The fact that a disaster was narrowly averted by some alert passengers and airline personnel does not mean that any preventive system worked. The fire extinguisher worked. It extinguished the fire caused by the failed attempt to detonate the explosive device.
On Monday (today), Secretary Napolitano began to back pedal from her earlier statements. Unfortunately she tried to claim that her previous statement, “The system worked.” was taken out of context. I listened to several of the Sunday news shows. She repeated the same spin on each show. The “context” was that she was asked “Why didn’t airport security prevent him from boarding an airliner bound for the U.S.?” In each context, her answer was essentially the same: “The system has worked very, very smoothly.”
Secretary Napolitano is now trying to clarify her earlier remarks by saying she was referring to “the system of quickly notifying other flights and law enforcement on the ground.” Unfortunately that is NOT the context of her earlier remarks. She was not asked whether the system had succesfully notified other flights and law enforcement agencies (to prevent other attacks). She was asked how THIS attack was not prevented.
I am very disappointed in this spin from the Secretary of Homeland Security, and similar spins offered by Robert Gibbs, the Presidential spokesperson. Americans are not well served by such spin. We deserve, indeed we demand better answers from our public officials. Most importantly, in addition to the reactive reviews of current security provisions and processes as announced by President Barack Obama, we deserve, indeed we demand, better proactive plans to prevent future attacks or attempted attacks.
Tags: airline safety, Gibbs, Homeland Security, Napolitano, Obama, President, security, spin, terrorism
