Christmas Day Terrorist Attack In The Air - Detroit

Some officials pointed to long-standing tensions between the CIA and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, whose office was created in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

A sweeping 2004 intelligence overhaul left gaps in authorities and responsibilities, fueling the discord, they said.

baudot said: So: It is the new administration's fault that a man who passed through non-US security was successful is setting his underwear on fire?

Security charade: how I made a bomb and blew up a plane
ANDREW GILLIGAN
January 1, 2010

I bombed an airliner a few years ago. Just like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, I easily got my bomb through airport security.

Unlike underpants man, however, I blew a big enough hole to bring my plane down in flight and kill everyone aboard.

This was, admittedly, television, not terrorism - a UK Channel 4 Dispatches documentary.

But the plane was real enough - part of a decommissioned passenger jet on the ground at a Hampshire airfield.

And the bomb was real, too. We created it by mixing together two easily obtainable chemicals - I'm not telling you what they are, obviously - which are colourless, odourless, undetectable by scanners and look like water to any security guard.

I didn't need to worry about hiding them in my smalls; I and an accomplice could have brought them on board disguised as two bottles of mineral water.

I used a commercial detonator. But a homemade one, which can also be carried through security in a phone or an iPod, would have created just the same effect: a massive fireball which blew a large hole in the side of the cabin, snapping the aircraft's ribs.

Had the explosion occurred in flight, there would have been rapid depressurisation and loss of control; at altitude, the damage would have been even greater, almost certainly bringing the aircraft down.

In the week since the Abdulmutallab attack, there have been the usual crass, simplistic demands for ever more intrusive airport security - scanners that figuratively strip us naked, and so on.

But the purpose of my little demonstration, and the reason for recalling it now, is to show that ever more intrusive blanket checks are the wrong answer.

Unless we are all actually forced to strip naked at the airport - and probably not even then - the fact is that we can never erect a Berlin wall to physically stop everyone taking bad things on planes.

All our efforts to do so, all the silly routines to which we dutifully submit, are at best a minor hindrance, a deterrent to nutters; at worst a charade and a distraction from the real target.

In my documentary, Philip Baum, the editor of the magazine Aviation Security International, said he could not recall a single time when a bomb had been found using an airport X-ray machine alone.

Airport security, he said, was "theatre", designed to reassure the public rather than to stop bombers.

The Abdulmutallab case would seem to support this view.

Many airport X-ray machines cannot, in fact, detect most types of explosives: Baum ran a recent trial for a European government where a woman passed successfully through 24 different airports with the complete components of a bomb concealed on her body.

But even if the technology was better (and it is, to be fair, improving), it's largely beside the point.

At the moment, aviation security is about looking for suspicious things. It should be about looking for suspicious people.

That doesn't mean scrutiny on the basis of race. To single out all young south Asian men - given the vast numbers of them passing through Heathrow - would be almost as blanket and pointless as what we currently do.

It means scrutiny on the basis of behaviour. A would-be bomber will show greater stress and nervousness than the average.

Those with such signs could be selected for extra checks that would have a better chance of detecting a bomb. Unlike blanket checks, this procedure has found bombers in the past.

By the time a bomber reaches the airport, however, it is probably too late.

And even if we can improve airport security's strike rate for passengers boarding planes, there is currently nothing to prevent a terrorist blowing himself up in the check-in area.

Airport security means, above all, starting long before the airport, with intelligence.

Abdulmutallab was already known to the authorities, and on a watchlist; it should therefore have been very easy to single him out for extra checks.

That was the failure in this case.

That is the answer, not ever more machines, ever more guards, and ever more grannies taking off their shoes.

One of the defining characteristics of New Labour in Britain - from child-molester checks on school volunteers to ID cards - is its belief that everyone is a suspect.

Not only is that illiberal, it just doesn't work.

What it means is that the guilty get missed because the authorities are spending too much time hassling the innocent.

That lesson applies just as much to airport security as any other area.

Worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday, President Obama met on Dec. 22 with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them.

In a separate White House meeting that day, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day.

Yet in those sessions, government officials never considered or connected links that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seem so evident and indicated that the gathering threat in Yemen would reach into the United States.

Just as lower-level counterterrorism analysts failed to stitch together the pieces of information that would have alerted them to the possibility of a suicide bomber aboard a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas, top national security officials failed to fully appreciate mounting evidence of the dangers beyond the Arabian Peninsula posed by extremists linked to Yemen.

US Airways jet lands when religious item mistaken as bomb

A US Airways passenger plane was diverted to Philadelphia on Thursday after a religious item worn by a Jewish passenger was mistaken as a bomb, Philadelphia police said.

A passenger was alarmed by the phylacteries, religious items which observant Jews strap around their arms and heads as part of morning prayers, on the flight from New York's La Guardia airport heading to Louisville.

"Someone on the plane construed it as some kind of device," said officer Christine O'Brien, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia police department.

No one was arrested or charged, O'Brien said.

The plane landed without incident and the passengers and crew were taken off the plane, a spokesman for US Airways said.

Phylacteries, called tefillin in Hebrew, are two small black boxes with black straps attached to them. Observant Jewish men are required to place one box on their head and tie the other one on their arm each weekday morning.

WASHINGTON – The Nigerian suspect in a failed Christmas Day airliner bombing turned against the cleric who claims to be his teacher and has helped the U.S. hunt for the radical preacher, a law enforcement official said Thursday.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who faces terrorism charges in the Christmas bombing, has been cooperating with the FBI for days, providing information about his contacts in Yemen and the al-Qaida affiliate that operates there.

His cooperation talking about U.S.-born Yemeni radical Anwar al-Awlaki is significant because it could provide fresh clues for authorities trying to capture or kill him in the remote mountains of Yemen. Al-Awlaki has emerged has a prominent al-Qaida recruiter and has been tied to the 9/11 hijackers, Abdulmutallab and the suspect in November's deadly shooting rampage at Fort Hood.

The law enforcement official would not say what information Abdulmutallab provided, but al-Awlaki himself said in a recent interview that he and Abdulmutallab had kept in contact. A senior U.S. intelligence official said al-Awlaki represented the biggest name on the list of people Abdulmutallab might have information against. Both spoke on condition anonymity to discuss the sensitive ongoing investigation.

Abdulmutallab's cooperation with U.S. authorities is at the center of a political dispute in Washington. Democrats say it proves the Obama administration was correct to handle the case as a criminal matter. Republicans accuse the administration of leaking details for political purposes.

thefreak said:
He's apparently cooperating with the US.

-TM

MrCrisp said:

But they tortured him first, right? How else could they have gotten him to spill the beans?

Coyotemike said:

Worse. They called his mom.