Re-Learning History

More than eight years after September 11th, you have to wonder how this was possible.

Remember that when the screening system failed on 9-11, it was left to the passengers of Flight #93 to recognize the dawn of a new kind of terror, and to take their survival into their own hands. Those citizen-passengers, not the airport screening process or the USG saved the Capitol building that day.

The story is not materially different for that of Richard Reid – aka Tariq Raja or the “Shoe Bomber” – who was trying to ignite explosives in his footwear 90 days after 9-11 in a flight from Europe to the US. Only the watchful eye of flight attendants and the intervention of flight crew and passengers to capture and subdue Reid prevented a cascade of death and destruction.

In the years since 9-11, governments around the world have spent a small fortune to improve security to make air travel safe. The US has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to create a domestic security apparatus from scratch, including $50 billion specifically for the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to improve airport security for the US.

In the intervening years, TSA has developed a mind-numbing list of prohibitions and protocols that have turned a once fashionable and efficient form of travel into a nightmare of logistical preparation and obdurate delay. This routine plays out at the whim of screening officials, whose petty tyrannies are visited arbitrarily upon the traveling public.

In addition, a global intelligence apparatus, which gleans, processes and integrates data from around the world, contributes to “no fly” lists, that, when matched with screening procedures are supposed to provide a trusted security system that we can depend on.

Yet despite this formidable array of technology and hair-pulling protocol and process – which has nabbed government officials, and law-abiding citizens, and distressed a never-ending number of grandmas in politically-correct random searches on the way to the gate – the system failed on Christmas Day.

What is so infuriating is that the tactics that were used by Nigerian terrorist Umar Aarouk Abulmutallab were not materially different than those of the 9-11 murderers before we put the colossally expensive, behemoth bureaucracy in place.

Again, only the flinty and determined efforts of passengers, led this time by Dutch video producer Jasper Schuringa, saved Northwest Flight #253 from being blown out of the sky by an Al Qaeda trained, Yemen-based terrorist, causing catastrophic death and destruction.

Can you honestly say you feeling secure right around now?

Certainly Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano isn’t helping.

In a deeply uneven performance in the aftermath of the attempted attack, Napolitano made the spectacularly laughable statement that “the system worked;” words only made worse by Napolitano’s required clarification on the Sunday talk shows that the system worked “after” the attempted terrorist attack.

Hello? Isn’t the whole point of invasive body scans, on-the-spot sorting and inspection of electronics gear and toiletries, barefoot metal detector walk-throughs and “no fly” lists to prevent acts of terror?

Predictably, after the proverbial horses have left the barn, TSA has issued new regulations. Now all US-bound passengers aboard international flights must undergo a “thorough pat-down” at boarding gates, focused on the upper legs and torso.

Can cavity searches be far off?

This is not an argument to do less. But with the resources we have thrown at domestic security, to do it better and more efficiently. Recognizing that no system is perfect, we should at least expect that our investment since 9-11 would stop an incident that is not materially different than 9-11. But is that what we have gotten? The question is whether we have created a system of genuine security, or simply a “Potemkin Village” perception of it.

This brings us more broadly to the Obama administration and its reaction to the crisis.

Team Obama’s public reaction to attack was unnervingly tentative.

Obama waited too long before talking to the public.

It’s true that when Richard Reid tried to take down an airliner in December 2001, President Bush waited nearly eleven days before commenting publicly on the affair. But Bush had already gone through the tribulation of 9-11, and his own bumpy conversation with the American people on security and terrorism, where he found his sea legs.

This was an opportunity for Obama to place his stamp on American anti-terror policy in a manner that the domestic fracas over Gitmo and his more recent tin-ear on the Ft. Hood shootings, did not.

And, the three-day Obama delay was frankly compounded by Napolitano’s weak and uncertain performance, It left you wondering who exactly was in charge, a spectacle that Obama can ill-afford.

Once Obama did come forward to address the public, POTUS was spot-on, saying all the right things.

Given the Administration’s “war on terminology” earlier this year, it was refreshing to see the President call this an “attempted terrorist attack” and not a “man-caused disaster.”

And while his wording was far more nuanced that that of President Bush, it is not hard to see what Obama was promising beyond comprehensive reviews of intelligence processing, watch lists and screening procedures to protect air travelers, “…but those who would slaughter innocent men, women and children must know that the United States will do more than simply strengthen our defenses — we will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle, and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us.”

That is a veritable, Toby Keith, “we’ll put a boot in your arse” from this Administration.

It is noteworthy that the President’s strong statement obscures an obvious policy tension brewing out of immediate public sight.

Despite the fact that Al Qaeda in Yemen has taken responsibility for the aborted attack – confirming its terrorist roots, Abdulmutallab is in a Detroit civil prison, and has stopped cooperating with the FBI after securing a defense attorney.

You read that correctly.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this man is an enemy combatant and should be at Gitmo being interrogated as such. Even the feather pillow methods that Obama put in place are superior to affording this man the protections of an American citizen accused of a civil crime, particularly when he may be in possession of actionable intelligence.

God help the Administration if this attack was only a prelude to other attacks that Abdulmutallab is privy to

This is the emerging, precarious Obama balancing act that is ultimately self-defeating; to treat terrorists in custody as common criminals, affording them all the rights and protections of a civil judicial proceeding, while at the same time the Administration aggressively prosecutes the fight against terrorists abroad.

Ultimately, it makes no sense, and this contradiction will eventually work its way into the public consciousness as the Administration moves forward with its plan to close Gitmo and try hardened terrorists from 9-11 in civil court, only blocks from where the WTC once stood.

But despite the Administration’s immediate, underwhelming public response to the attempted attack, and its deep attachment to treating terrorists as simple criminals, no different than car thieves and embezzlers, Republicans would do well to hold their fire on any “weak on terrorism” charges.

First, as a matter of principle, politicizing terror is exactly what the Republicans accused Democrats of doing when the GOP was running the show, particularly on Iraq. Changing chairs doesn’t suddenly make it ok.

Constructive criticism yes, wildly toxic rhetoric, no.

And the fact is we are all collectively caught up in this.

Obamaphiles, always looking for someone to blame, wasted no time in pointing to the security apparatus put in place by the Bush administration as the culprit. And it is true that the systems and protocols in place today were created in the last eight years, subject to whatever Obama tweaks that have been made in the last year.

But the emerging evidence is that this was not a systemic failure as much as a human and process failure. The mechanisms of coordination were there, but for some reason, they were not used or ignored.

How is it that credible information provided by the terrorist’s father to US Embassy and CIA officials Nigeria did not immediately lead to suspending Abdulmutallab’s visa for the US?

Why was it that the father’s information was not deemed sufficient to put the terrorist on a “no fly” list, particularly since our British allies denied Abdulmutallab’s request for a visa renewal without triggering a similar US review?

Moreover, how can it be that an individual passenger, traveling from Nigeria – with its well known security lapses – without checked luggage and purchasing a ticket in cash did not raise red flags? As Ruth Marcus said in The Washington Post, “What did he have to do – where a sign saying, ‘You might want to check my underwear?’”1

As the Democrats were fond of saying during the Bush administration, “No one connected the dots.”

But the collective failures of the aborted Christmas Day attack does not change the Obama administration’s record of quiet but very aggressive use of force against key terrorist infrastructure.

Team Obama may not call it a War on Terror, but they are certainly fighting it as one overseas, particularly in the use of Predator drones to hunt down and kill Al Qaeda leadership in countries in the region. It has been highly successful in doing so in the outlaw, frontier region of Pakistan were Al Qaeda lives and breeds.

For all these reasons, the GOP needs to be very careful in its comments, utilizing fact-based criticism as a vehicle to improve security for Americans; differentiating between objectionable treatment of terrorists as common criminals with American legal rights, while welcoming the Administration’s determination to use force to eliminate Al Qaeda cells wherever they exist.

In closing, a lesson.

After eight years and the literal creation of a vast domestic security apparatus from scratch, channeling hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars ostensibly to keep Americans safe, a 23 year old Nigerian beat the system just as the 9-11 hijackers did.

That should give you pause.

Now what would you think that says about the government’s ability to run something mundane, say, like health care?

It is a sad truth that alert passengers and crew will remain the first line of defense in the air, like videographer Jasper Schuringa on Flight #253, and Todd Beamer on Flight #93 back in 2001.
In this summer’s action movie, “Terminator Salvation,” a popular tag line was, “if you are listening, you are the resistance.” Today, if you are taking to the friendly skies, you are the unfortunately the first line of resistance.

1. The Washington Post, December 30, 2009, A13