The Real Culprit in the Underwear Bombing?
It's the U.S. embassy in Lagos, argues Thomas Lipscomb.
Once a credible person of the stature of Abdulmutullab's father, multimillionaire Umaru Mutullab, one of the most important figures in banking in all of Africa, contacted the Embassy and said he feared his son had been "radicalized," the Embassy should have immediately reviewed the young man's American multiple entry visa granted to him by the American Embassy in London in 2008 and placed a hold on it pending a hearing. But that's not what happened. According to the Department of State, Umaru had a face to face meeting at the request of high officials in Nigerian Security with top American embassy officials on November 19th. And the records at State show what did happen.
The Department of State did a cursory derogatory information sweep on Abdulmutullab on November 20th and found nothing. Then on November 23rd The Department of State referred the matter to the Department of Justice which concluded with his being added to the TIDE database. There is no evidence that any attempt was made to contact British authorities where the young man had lived in a 4 million pound flat while on a student visa to the UK. His American visa had been issued in London. If they had, they might have learned the British had already pulled Abdulmutullab's visa last May.
Apparently no one ever considered the easiest, simplest step to review the multiple entry visa and associated travel records to see if something had changed that might lend credence to the father's concern.
The visa is not an automatic right for a foreign citizen. An American entry visa is a privilege granted under certain circumstances. Requiring a hearing to consider the new information doesn't require making a final judgment. Maybe this charge was just an outgrowth of some family feud. It simply ensures that new information is analyzed before access is continued. If rumors of Abdulmutullab's trips to Yemen and other terrorist hot spots are true, the evidence for them might have surfaced during the visa review.
The British government, for reasons of its own, denied Abdulmutullab re-entry in May of this year. The announced reason was that he had interrupted his education in the UK and the school he now intended to attend was not considered "legitimate." Clearly, whatever the reason, the British Foreign Ministry was doing its job.
Incompetent State Department consular officials and poor enforcement of visa procedures that have been in place long before the personal computer, the Xerox machine or even the jet airliner are the problem here. And we aren't hearing a word about it.
Better the American public should be forced to endure another blizzard of press releases announcing another round of ridiculous indignities by dazzling Rube Goldberg technology rather than have our press and our government demand an accounting from the employees at a government bureaucracy who can't even comply with their own time-tested procedures.
No, no, it's the privacy restrictions placed on air travel screening, replies former DHS official Stewart Coffin.
The intelligence/security agencies would like the consular officials in Nigeria to take the fall for this. The agencies seem to be telling journalists that the father's warning wasn't relayed to them with enough detail to justify putting Abdulmutallab on a no-fly or selectee list, so they just stuck him in the 550-thousand-name catchall database (known as TIDE, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment) rather than a more active 400-thousand-name database. But neither database would have made him a automatic "selectee" for special screening (roughly 14 thousand people are on that list), let alone no-fly status (4 thousand). And it's hard to imagine that even transmitting a full transcript of the father's warning would have boosted Abdulmutallab onto the selectee or no-fly list.
Why is it so hard to get on the selectee or no-fly lists? In part because privacy campaigners have made the lists less effective and more controversial by raising phony privacy concerns -- and getting Congress to buy into those concerns. Here's the problem: The lists are full of aliases and alternative spellings that the terrorists might use to defeat screening. As a result, many, many people (kids, Senators, grandmas) end up as selectees because their names resemble the aliases of terrorism suspects. The resulting hassles and complaints make officials cautious about adding large numbers of names to the selectee list.
So why doesn't the US use other information, like date of birth, to "disambiguate" the lists -- to separate terrorist suspects from regular folks? After all, we knew Abdulmutallab's birthdate, along with a lot of other information; there was no need to stop every Abdul Mutallab or Abdul-Mutallab or abu Mutallab from flying to the US. But DHS hasn't been able to disambiguate the list because privacy campaigners and Congress prohibited DHS from gathering birthdates from passengers. That information was too sensitive to share with the government, said the privacy groups, and they insisted that Congress prohibit DHS from running the selection process for years while DHS got over a series of privacy hurdles.
There are two ways to protect air travel: look for bombs or look for terrorists.
U.S. officials have consistently preferred the first policy. The underwear bomber dramatically illustrates the futility of that policy - and the huge potential advantages of the second.
Yet the government still won't learn.
Instead, we now will impose more kindergarten rules on travelers: sit still, hands beside your body. Security theater, not actual security.
Professor Bainbridge replies on behalf of the air-traveling public:
[N]one of these new restrictions would have impeded the bomber. He was fine with staying in his seat. To the contrary, it was the passenger who subdued the bomber that left his seat. Extra screening of carry on luggage would have been no problem for the bomber, since the bomber had the bomb sewn into his underwear.
Bureaucracies always recoil from responsibility, always seek to cover up their own mistakes by dumping the cost of their mistakes on the larger public. Fortunately we have an official charged with overseeing the bureaucracy and representing the public. He's called the president. I don't agree with those who demand that he now cancel his Hawaiian vacation. A tired Obama would make even worse decisions than a rested Obama. But he can and must still perform his most important duties while on vacation. In this case that means:
1) rescinding the new TSA rules;
2) reviving the targeted screening procedures abandoned under pressure from so-called privacy advocates
3) keeping the focus on the State Department's botched information sharing. It would be interesting to know: how vigorously did U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Robin Sanders press Washington to follow up on the information presented to her embassy?