The President is expected to give another speech today regarding the thwarted Christmas day terrorist attack. Shocker huh? This time he is also expected to announce his plan for preventing similar attacks going forward. Should be informative. Ha. It will be interesting to see if he finally takes on a more assertive tone as the report on the intelligence failures is also expected to be released today and will hardly paint the administration in a competent light.
Rumors as to the content of the report are less than comforting to say the least. ABC reported (video here) this morning that Customs and Border Control officials learned that a questionable individual had boarded the plane after examining the flight manifest and chose not to divert the aircraft. Instead, they decided to allow the plane to reach the United States where they planned to detain the individual (who we now know to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab) for questioning. Are you friggin kidding me? Yeah, you could say that invoked a “certain shock” when I heard it.
Look, I’m not delusional enough to believe that our intelligence agencies are capable of connecting the dots on the plans and whereabouts of the endless list of fundamentalist nutjobs that wish to do harm to Americans and American interests, but the paper trail dragging behind this one is getting pretty long and our intelligence agencies are beginning to appear grossly negligent to put it politely. Even without the benefit of hindsight, this one appears to have been among those threats which they should have deemed credible.
The new information shows that border enforcement officials discovered the suspected extremist ties involving the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in a database despite intelligence failures that have been criticized by President Obama.
“The people in Detroit were prepared to look at him in secondary inspection,” a senior law enforcement official said. “The decision had been made. The [database] had picked up the State Department concern about this guy — that this guy may have been involved with extremist elements in Yemen.”
If the intelligence had been detected sooner, it could have resulted in the interrogation and search of Abdulmutallab at the airport in Amsterdam, according to senior law enforcement officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
“They could have made the decision on whether to stop him from getting on the plane,” the senior law enforcement official said.
But an administration official said late Wednesday that the information would not have resulted in further scrutiny before the suspect departed. Abdulmutallab was in a database containing half a million names of people with suspected extremist links but who are not considered threats. Therefore, border security officials would have sought only to question him upon arrival in the U.S., the administration official said.
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