Now we know that had a few chemicals reacted differently, we might have had three hundred or so fatalities on Flight 253 and perhaps many more dead on the ground if the plane had fallen in a particularly unfortunate location. But was this really a breakdown in the system? We’re treating it as obvious that because the Xmas bomber’s dad went into the Embassy in Nigeria and said his son was going off the extremist deep end that that should have punched Abdulmutallab to the top of the watch lists and prevented him from getting on that plane in Amsterdam.
All the facts of what we knew are not clear to me. For instance, this article in Time says that it was specifically Abdulmutallab’s threat about blowing up a US airliner that sent his dad to the Embassy in Lagos. Did the dad say that specifically to the person he spoke to at the Embassy? Is the underlying claim even confirmed? If the dad specifically raised his son’s threat to blow up an airplane and that didn’t set off more alarms, okay, yes, that’s a bit of a problem.
And my point here is certainly not to say, no big deal.
But how many reports like this, of uncertain reliability and significance, come in to foreign service officers and intelligence agents around the world every day? And would our national security apparatus be able to do anything if each were elevated to crisis level? We’ve been tracking terrorism related news very closely this week. And there have already been numerous incidents of airports shut down or partially shut down. And all have turned out to be false alarms. A suspicious pink bag that ended up belonging to the airport shut down a major part of the airport in Minneapolis. The airport in Bakersfield was temporarily shut down because of some “fumes” that came out of a bottle. Another shutdown happened over the weekend in Newark. Clearly at this level of heightened scrutiny the whole system would eventually grind to a halt.
Just, once again to be clear, I’m not saying there weren’t mistakes made in this. And I’m not trying to reassure anyone in suggesting that there are just limits to how reliably we can detect and prevent every catastrophic threat. But a lot of the conversation I see in the papers and the cable shows about what went wrong here seems naive or tendentiously unrealistic about the classic intelligence challenge of distinguishing the ‘signal’ from the ‘noise’ in the cacophony of little tips and shreds of information that stream into the US government’s security channels every day.
Late Update: TPM Reader RK notes this …
You’re focusing too much on the father’s warning. It’s the warning combined with these additional facts that make the government’s failure so alarming:
1. Passenger’s name: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
2. One-way ticket from Yemen to Detroit
3. Ticket paid for with $3,000 cash
4. Passenger has no luggage
