Soccer Dad

Of watch lists and releases

My memory didn't fail me. Soon after 9/11 it was determined that at least one of the suspects had attended a flight school in the United States and made disturbing comments.

Rep. James L. Oberstar of Minnesota, who received the briefing and is the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation Committee, said the instructor called the bureau several times to find someone in authority who seemed willing to act on the information.

Oberstar said the instructor's warnings could not have been more blunt. The representative said, "He told them, 'Do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb?"'

Oberstar described the instructor as "an American hero" whose actions resulted in Moussaoui's arrest and might have prevented another suicide hijacking.

Congressional officials said the account by the school, the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, outside Minneapolis, raised new questions about why the FBI and other agencies did not prevent the hijackings.

Here's an excerpt from President Bush's statement for the reason for creating the department.

The President proposes to create a new Department of Homeland Security, the most significant transformation of the U.S. government in over half-century by largely transforming and realigning the current confusing patchwork of government activities into a single department whose primary mission is to protect our homeland. The creation of a Department of Homeland Security is one more key step in the President's national strategy for homeland security.

The thought was that with a single address, concerns about security wouldn't get lost in a massive bureaucratic maze. And yet last month after the Fort Hood massacre we learned:

Shortly after the massacre we learnedni (via Jihad Watch):

One such presentation has come to light: the June 2007 briefing which Hasan gave to other doctors at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Hasan's PowerPoint slides say many of the same things found in jihadist literature and propaganda throughout the Middle East and among its apologists here in America. Hasan's Islam is rooted in traditional understandings of the faith as taught by the authoritative schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence. It also is the same Islam that is taught by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Al-Qaeda.

In arguing that the Koran mandates defensive jihad against unbelievers, Hasan invokes the same Koranic verse that Osama bin Laden used as an epigraph on his "Letter to the American People" of October 2002: "Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged; and surely, Allah is able to give them victory."

Now we learn that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father warned the American embassy about his son. The Washington Post reports that the warning was ignored but explains why:

The lack of attention was not unusual, according to U.S. intelligence officials, who said that thousands of similar bits of information flow into the National Counterterrorism Center each week from around the world. Only those that indicate a specific threat, or add to an existing body of knowledge about an individual, are passed along for further investigation and possible posting on airline and border watch lists.

"It's got to be something that causes the information to sort of rise out of the noise level, because there is just so much out there," one intelligence official said.

In all three cases, the common thread isn't a lack of regulations (via Instapundit) but intelligence failures. And yet the response of DHS, is to promulgate new rules. I don't fault DHS for being a bureaucratic nightmare, but couldn't it at least learning from the past?

Another area where learning from the past would be useful are prisoner releases. It's frustrating when I read accounts of Israeli trades for captives. Invariably the reporter focuses on the amount of the time the released prisoners were away from their family and ignores the likelihood that he'll return to his old ways. The murder of Rabbi Meir Chai last week, brought that point home:

Nader Raed Sukarji, a 40 year-old inhabitant of Shechem, was arrested in 2002 and suspected of being a top Al Aksa terror group brigade operative and participant in many terror attacks. He also prepared bombs and helped establish explosives factories in Nablus (Shechem). He was released from prison in January 2009.

But it isn't just Israel, the recent bomb plot in Detroit was apparently masterminded by former guests at Gunatanamo.

Said Ali al Shihri and Muhammad al Awfi were captured in Afghanistan in late 2001, ABC News reported.

They were freed from Gitmo in November 2007 and promptly took up arms again against the United States after completing a bizarre "art-rehabilitation therapy" program in Saudi Arabia as a condition of their release.

"The so-called rehabilitation programs are a joke," a US diplomat told ABC.

(I wonder if the NY Times will now take a new look at those Saudi "rehabilitation" programs.)

Instead of issuing new directives that will mostly affect innocent passengers, why aren't the authorities looking more seriously at how to develop intelligence and rethinking their conditions for releasing detainees?

Posted by SoccerDad at December 29, 2009 5:46 AM