The Lessons of Flight 253

While taking a freeway-flyer's (chauffeur) break yesterday (while with R.S. McCain), I read this week's cover story at Time Magazine, "What We Can Learn from Flight 253." Like anyone should be, I'm extremely wary of the MSM newsweeklies, but I was surprised by the evenhanded reporting by Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson at the piece. The article's worth a read, certainly. I'll just leave two quotes that particularly caught my interest.

This one's from the introduction, focusing on the reaction among passengers to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's terror attempt:

Passengers later said there was something curious about the spare young man who had tried to bring down their plane: he was silent throughout the attack. He didn't panic. He didn't yell any last-second religious slogans. He was calm and methodical as he set himself on fire. It was as though he had been trained.

Of course, he had been trained, and fortunately not even better than he was. The remainder of the piece lays out the "four lessons" of the bombing attempt -- all of which have been rehashed over and over since the day after Christmas. But I give credit to Duffy and Thompson for their review and analysis, and "lesson #3" is something I discussed here over a week ago:

3. Al-Qaeda is bigger than Osama bin Laden:

As Obama sends 30,000 more troops to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for terrorists, it is obvious that al-Qaeda has set up franchises to wage offensive war against the U.S. in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Yemen, which has vast tracts of lawless countryside, has been harboring — and nurturing — terrorists for years. It is the site of the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors, as well as the stomping ground of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric and cyber–pen pal of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood, Texas, shooter who killed 13 people in November. Abdulmutallab visited Yemen at least twice, most recently from August to December 2009, studying Arabic — and, apparently, bombmaking.

The Yemeni government, under pressure from neighboring Saudi Arabia and the U.S. — and facing internal threats — has recently stepped up operations against al-Qaeda within its borders. With American help, it carried out air strikes Dec. 17 and 24, killing more than 60 militants. But al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), is a distinctly creative branch. In August a supposedly repentant member of AQAP drew close to Saudi Arabia's Deputy Interior Minister before detonating a bomb secreted in his anal cavity, according to Stratfor, a well-regarded private intelligence outfit based in Texas. Although the attacker died, his target was only slightly wounded. A Stratfor report issued five days later concluded, "The operation could have succeeded had it been better executed" — a judgment that sounds a great deal like the early verdict on Flight 253.

And it turns out that there's yet another day of breaking (and damaging) news on the Flight 253 attempt. From the Los Angeles Times, "U.S. Learned Intelligence on Airline Attack Suspect While He Was En Route" (via Memeorandum):

U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed, officials disclosed Wednesday.

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.

Nonetheless, the disclosure shows the complexity of the intelligence and passenger screening systems that are the subject of comprehensive reviews that the administration will release today.

Is it just me, or as more news comes out the "complexity" angle is increasingly offered up to take the heat off the administration?

At least at the Duffy and Thompson piece they hammer DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. But she hasn't been fired, so the "lessons" for the administration aren't quite sinking in enough yet, I guess?

More later ...