NOT THE SHARPEST KNIVES IN THE DRAWER: Obama Administration Christmas Bomber Missteps Worse Than You Think
The ineptness demonstrated by U.S. agencies in dealing with (alleged) Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - both before he boarded Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit and after he was taken into custody for his failed attempt at blowing the plane out of the sky - is staggering.
The New York Times details “far more warning signs than the administration has acknowledged” based on “two dozen interviews with White House and American intelligence officials and with counterterrorism officials in Europe and Yemen” (they are distilled into this graphic):
In September, for example, a United Nations expert on Al Qaeda warned policy makers in Washington that the type of explosive device used by a Yemeni militant in an assassination attempt in Saudi Arabia could be carried aboard an airliner.
In early November, American intelligence authorities say they learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named “Umar Farouk” — the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — had volunteered for a coming operation.
In late December, more intercepts of Qaeda operatives in Yemen, who had previously focused their attacks in the region, mentioned the date of Dec. 25 … and seemingly prescient - threats against the United States.
“We carry prayer beads, and with them we carry a bomb for the enemies of God,” a man describing himself as a Qaeda fighter from Yemen announced in a video released on Al Jazeera satellite television. …
Counterterrorism officials assumed that the militants were not sophisticated or ambitious enough to send operatives into the United States. …
So, though intelligence analysts had enough information in those days before Christmas to block the suicide bomber on the Northwest flight, they did not act.
And testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy said that the agency was not aware that Abdulmutallab had been issued a multi-entry visa because his name had been misspelled and the agency’s name-checking software did not include a feature to flag alternative spellings. Considering the number of variations in the spelling of “Mohammad,” for instance, this is inexcusable.
Finally, in his testimony before the committee, the Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged what every right-thinking person had already figured out: Abdulmutallab “should have been treated as a terror suspect when the plane landed” [and questioned] “by special interrogators rather than standard law enforcement officers”:
Blair [said] he was not consulted on whether Abdulmutallab should be questioned by the recently created High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG.
"That unit was created exactly for this purpose," Blair said. "We did not invoke the HIG in this case. We should have."
But then, Blair shouldn’t be surprised that he was not in the loop when the decision was made to proceed as though Abdulmutallab was a criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant, because in the Obama administration that call is Attorney General Eric Holder’s to make and not his.
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