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Taylor Marsh has been writing on line since 1996, with the archives provided here a representation of that work.

Tag Archives | Nigeria

Napolitano Eats Her Words

By on 28 December 2009

late update below

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Like this wasn’t predictable.

As predictable as this opening paragraph in the Wall Street Journal.

A U.S. government that has barred the phrase “war on terror” has nonetheless acknowledged that a failed Christmas day bomb attack on an airliner was a terrorist attempt. Can we all now drop the pretense that we stopped fighting a war once Dick Cheney and George W. Bush left the White House?

The instant I heard Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano utter the words, “the system worked,” I’ve waited for the ass covering that was bound to come. Today it arrived.

When you’re talking about “context,” you’re screwed. Why don’t smart people ever learn that lesson? Easy. They think we’re stupid.

The statement Napolitano made on Sunday was not only ridiculously absurd counter-intuitive, but something any civilian, even one not usually following national security and terrorism threats, could deduce was utter crap.


Obama’s first statement, as he fumbles a bit
when talking about Abdulmutallab, but
delivers strong statement on Iran violence.

Let’s see, a young Nigerian male, whose flight originated out of Lagos airport on the continent of Africa, a notoriously iffy security proposition to begin with, reportedly buys a one-way ticket (LATE UPDATE: the reports turned out to be false, by the way), paying in cash, with his father (chairman of Nigeria’s FirstBank, the oldest bank in the country, with offices in London, Paris and Beijing), notifying the U.S. embassy in Nigeria that his son has been radicalized, warning the U.S., with the young man attempting a terrorist attack that was foiled by sheer sweet luck, but “the system worked.”

Excuse me if I’m a bit queasy over this whole incident, but folks, our government is incompetent and it doesn’t matter whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge, even as the latter circle the wagons. This many years after 9/11 and we still can’t get it down that someone on a terrorist watch list should have extra screening?

And how dare I suggest that behavioral profiling might be something we should adopt! How wingnuttery of me to be so cool headed as to ponder the notion that some of what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab exhibited might have been a flaming red flag.

For all the blathering about national security, we’re not very serious in this country about actually providing it. Even as I support Pres. Obama’s mission in Afghanistan, even if he won’t say it’s humanitarian when it is, the people against it have a good case to make when our own national security still appears like a sieve.

It would take tens of millions of dollars to secure every airport, including surveillance on baggage handlers. However, international flights or connecting flights could possibly be a first start.

But in this juvenile nation, a place where we secure our safety in fits and starts and only in the aftermath of a threat, our eyes are continually turned beyond our borders to the world. Changing the world by policing it, something we still do well (war and weaponry actually the only thing we still produce and can sell), while we crumble at home.

As for our own soil, using the term of the day, let’s be honest, the pure luck reality that we haven’t been hit again looks like it will be the case until it runs out, which it will eventually. (God help the poor sad sod of a politician and political party that happens to be at the helm when hell comes visiting again, because the foreshadowing is already 9 years long.)

But maybe I’m not being fair. After all, you can’t expect mere humans to be able to handle this gargantuan task. There is just too much information out there.

“It’s got to be something that causes the information to sort of rise out of the noise level, because there is just so much out there,” one intelligence official said.

Isn’t this what we heard from Bush-Cheney after 9/11? You know, after tales of CIA director George Tenet’s “hair on fire” warnings during the summer of 2001, when that now famous PDB was read by George W. Bush on vacation, not spurring any action at all. Revealing that Rep. King’s outlandish pronouncements that the latest near catastrophe in midair is why we need Gitmo and interrogations, even if those never helped George W. Bush avert Richard Reid just months after 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch; even as Mary Matalin spins the fantasy that 9/11 was what Bush inherited from Clinton.

The U.S. can’t possibly stop terrorism attempts because we can’t tell what’s real and what’s not, because the flood of information is just too much. Mr. Yglesias takes a big swallow of this nonsense, questioning whether more information is really a good thing. Yeah, because stupid is the thing. Democrats sounding like a silly Republican trying to spin this one.

Bluntly, this latest terrorism attempt reveals our governmental incompetence inaction.

Then again, maybe the problem is us.

TM.com Reader and commenter “Marie205″
27 December 2009 at 1:53 pm

I hate to say this but “You can have all the security in the world to stop terrorist like this guy, and in the end one of his terrorist friends will make it through” I know that might sound crude to some people. I was in London during the train bombings a couple years back, it was my very first trip over seas and I remember being terrified the day the bombs took place. However, when I looked around at the face coming up out of the damaged subways and on the streets I noticed a difference culturally with the English and Americans. The folks I was around that day didn’t become hysterical at all they were upset but kept there cool. There media didn’t go overboard about the London bombings and everyone around me handled it with an adult manner. Once I made it back to the State, American media was is in overdrive as if our country would be under attack soon. People around me here was walking around afraid of there own shadows, it was pathetic to witness. Here I was returning from almost losing my life in the London train bombings renewed with the strength I got from English men and Women, who refuse to be afraid or let the terrorist ruin their lives to my home country of frighten children. I really do believe Americans have a lot of growing up do we seem to think of ourselves as if bad things are never suppose to happen to us. After we suffer from the best nation on earth attitude; but were not just like other countries we will be attacked.

The “Department of Homeland Security” is a joke, a waste of money we don’t have, a redundant department of massive irrelevance, not to mention a public relations nightmare, as Mr. Tom Ridge, followed by Ms. Napolitano, have both conclusively proved, with duties that could be performed by another agency or better yet, shared.

Anyone laughing?

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Britain Reportedly Denied Abdulmatallab Entry

By on 27 December 2009

bumped

What happened between the reports to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria from Abdulmatallab’s own father, Umaru Mutallab, a Nigerian banker, and the decision to put the young Nigerian on a watch list, but not on the no-fly list? The WSJ is reporting that State shared the information with U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism bureaus. Where it went after that and who made the decisions following are worth investigating. Why did Britain reportedly understand the dangers but we didn’t?

Jake Tapper is reporting that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on “This Week” that after the failed terrorism attempt things worked “like clockwork,” but “she wasn’t so sure about how well the government performed before the incident.” Gibbs was his usual glib self, talking about make sure there was “no clog in the bureaucratic plumbing.”

The Washington Post writes today that one anonymous Administration source said there was “insufficient derogatory information available” about Abdulmatallab to include him in anything beyond a database for terrorism related individuals. I’d like to know what is sufficient if someone’s own father, a significant individual in Nigeria, thinks his son might be a danger to the U.S.

At first glance, with facts still rolling in, this looks dangerously like sloppy gate keeping, the same we saw under Bush-Cheney.

I’d sure like to see the surveillance tapes to see what type of behavior Abdulmatallab was exhibiting before he got on the plane. It’s impolitic to say, but I also wonder when countries, including our own, are going to quit making everyone go through histrionics like being basically tied to your airline seat one hour before landing, which is absurd, and instead do some simple profiling of behavior, perhaps taking Israel’s El Al’s lead, as was talked about after 9/11.

During the interrogation, ticket holders are also psychologically evaluated. Their entire makeup is judged by tone of voice, mood and body language. The information is sent by computer to international law enforcement agencies, such as Interpol or Scotland Yard, for instant evaluation.

A discussion about profiling in the U.S. invariably begins and ends with race, completely ignoring behavior. Instead, airlines and countries across the globe shrug off psychological tells that could reveal something is very wrong. When used with the other traditional methods of discovering bombs, etc., we’d have another layer of security in place.

But this long after 9/11, the U.S. in particular, including obviously the airlines, just don’t take safety seriously.

More from the Washington Post article today:

Administration officials acknowledged Saturday that Abdulmutallab’s name was added in November to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, which contains about 550,000 individuals and is maintained by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the National Counterterrorism Center. TIDE is a catch-all list into which all terrorist-related information is sent.

Some, but not all, information from TIDE is transferred to the FBI-maintained Terrorist Screening Data Base (TSDB), from which consular, border and airline watch lists are drawn. The Transportation Security Administration has a “no-fly” list of about 4,000 people who are prohibited from boarding any domestic or U.S.-bound aircraft. A separate list of about 14,000 “selectees” require additional scrutiny but are not banned from flying.

Abdulmutallab’s name never made it past the TIDE database. “A TIDE record on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was created in November 2009,” one administration official said, but “there was insufficient information available on the subject at that time to include him in the TSDB or its ‘no fly’ or ‘selectee’ lists.”

There is another report about how the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had radicalized the young Nigerian, giving more ammunition for the case that U.S. involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have caused serious blow back: His father said he became radicalized after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and on the Pentagon, and by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the real tell in this story so far is that unlike the U.S., who only had Abdulmatallab in the terrorist database but didn’t go any further, the UK Times is reporting that Britain had already taken action against the young Nigerian:

The son of a prominent Nigerian banker, who allegedly attempted to blow up a transatlantic flight over America, was barred from returning to Britain earlier this year.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, graduated from a university in London last year but his visa request was refused in May when he attempted to apply for a new course at a bogus college.

… [...] He attempted to return to Britain for a six-month course in May this year but was refused by officials from the UK Border Agency.

“He was refused entry on grounds that he was applying to study at an educational establishment that we didn’t consider to be genuine,” a Whitehall official said.

Neither the Washington Post, nor the WSJ, among others, has any reporting about Britain denying Abdulmutallab’s entry in May 2009.

Now, it’s all eyes on Lagos airport, with rising concern over security out of Africa.

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