Janet Napolitano

Napolitano Acknowledges Security Failed

WASHINGTON (By Eric Lipton and Scott Shane, NYT) December 28, 2009 — Back tracking from a widely criticized assertion over the weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a televised interview on Monday the thwarted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day represented a failure of the nation’s aviation security system, not a success.

Ms. Napolitano said on the “Today” program on NBC her remark on Sunday the system worked had been taken out of context. “Our system did not work in this instance,” she said on the program. “No one is happy or satisfied with that. An extensive review is under way.”

As criticism mounted security lapses had led to a brush with disaster, President Obama on Sunday ordered a review of the two major planks of the aviation security system — the creation of watch lists and the use of detection equipment at airport check points. Some members of Congress urgently questioned why, eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks, security measures still cannot keep make shift bombs off airliners.

The White House press office, traveling with President Barack Obama in Hawaii, said early Monday the president would make a statement from the Kaneoho Marine Base in the morning, the Associated Press reported.

The family of the suspect arrested in the Dec. 25 incident, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said on Monday they had been trying to locate him for weeks, had sought help from Nigerian and American officials and would cooperate with an investigation. His father, a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official, phoned the American Embassy in Abuja in October with a warning his son had developed radical views, had disappeared and might have traveled to Yemen. But embassy officials did not revoke the young man’s visa to enter the United States, which was good until June 2010.

Instead, officials said on Sunday, they marked the file of the son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa. And when they passed the information on to Washington, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name was added to 550,000 others with some alleged terrorist connections — but not to the no-fly list. That meant no flags were raised when he used cash to buy a ticket to the United States and boarded a plane, checking no bags.

A jittery air travel system coped with a new scare on Sunday. On the same flight Mr. Abdulmutallab took on Friday — Northwest 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit — an ailing Nigerian man who spent a long time in the restroom inadvertently set off a security alert. It turned out to be a false alarm.

Officials in several countries, meanwhile, worked to retrace Mr. Abdulmutallab’s path and to look for security holes. In Nigeria, officials said he arrived in Lagos on Christmas Eve, just hours before departing for Amsterdam. American officials were tracking his travels to Yemen, and Scotland Yard investigators were checking on his connections in London, where he studied from 2005 to 2008 at University College London and was president of the Islamic Society.

Obama administration officials scrambled over the weekend to portray the episode, in which passengers and flight attendants subdued Mr. Abdulmutallab and doused the fire he had started, as a test the air safety system passed.

“The system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days,” Ms. Napolitano said in an interview on “This Week” on ABC. Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, used nearly the same language on “Face the Nation” on CBS, saying “in many ways, this system has worked.”

But counterterrorism experts and members of Congress were hardly willing to praise what they said was a security system that had proved to be not nimble enough to respond to the ever-creative techniques devised by would-be terrorists.

Congressional leaders said the tip from Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, should have resulted in closer scrutiny of the suspect before he boarded the plane in Amsterdam. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, the ranking minority member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said his visa should have been revoked, or he at least should have been given a physical pat-down or a full-body scan.

“This individual should not have been missed,” Ms. Collins said in an interview on Sunday. “Clearly, there should have been a red flag next to his name.”

The episode has renewed a debate that has quietly continued since the 2001 attacks over the proper balance between security and privacy. The government has spent the last several years cutting the size of the watch list, after repeated criticism too many people were being questioned at border crossings or checkpoints. Now it may be asked to expand it again.

“You are second-guessed one day and criticized on another,” said one Transportation Security Administration official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

Privacy advocates, for example, have tried to stop or at least slow the introduction of advanced checkpoint screening devices that use so-called millimeter waves to create an image of a passenger’s body, so officers can see under clothing to determine if a weapon or explosive has been hidden. Security officers, in a private area, review the images, which are not stored. Legislation is pending in the House that would prohibit the use of this equipment for routine passenger screening.

To date, only 40 of these machines have been installed at 19 airports across the United States — meaning only a tiny fraction of passengers pass through them. Amsterdam’s airport has 15 of these machines — more than just about any airport in the world — but an official there said Sunday they were prohibited from using them on passengers bound for the United States, for a reason she did not explain.

Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security, and Kip Hawley, who ran the Transportation Security Administration until January, said the new body-scanning machines were a critical tool that should quickly be installed in more airports nationwide.

For now, American aviation officials have mandated airports across the world do physical pat-downs of passengers on flights headed to the United States, a practice that in the past has also raised privacy objections.

“I understand people have issue with privacy,” Mr. Hawley said Sunday. “But that is a tradeoff, and what happened on the plane just highlights what the stakes are.”

So far, an additional 150 full-body imaging machines have been ordered, but nationwide there are approximately 2,200 checkpoint screening lanes.

One subject of the administration’s security review will be the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or Tide, the extensive collection of data on more than 500,000 people into which the warning from Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father’s was entered.

A law enforcement official said it was not unusual a one-time comment from a relative would not place a person on the far smaller no-fly list, which has only 4,000 names, or the so-called selectee list of 14,000 names of people who are subjected to more thorough searches at checkpoints.

The point of the Tide database, the official said, is to make sure even the most minor suspicious details are recorded so they can be connected to new data in the future.

“The information goes in there, and it’s available to all the agencies,” the official said. “The point is to marry up data from different sources over time that may indicate an individual might be a terrorist.”

The debate over watch lists and screening will be shaped in part by the still-emerging details about Mr. Abdulmutallab, his radicalization, his alleged training in Yemen and the bombing attempt. On Sunday, officials were still examining his claim he received help from a bomb expert in Yemen associated with Al Qaeda.

Mr. Abdulmutallab was moved on Sunday from a University of Michigan hospital and transferred to a federal prison in Milan, Mich.

Mr. Mutallab, the suspect’s father, was scheduled to make a public statement on Monday after talking to Nigerian security officials in Abuja. A cousin of Mr. Abdulmutallab, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to offend the family, said in an interview on Sunday there was no sign of radicalism in Mr. Abdulmutallab while he was growing up in Nigeria, though he was devout.

“We understand he met some people who influenced him while in London,” where Mr. Abdulmutallab studied engineering, the cousin said. “He left London and went to Yemen where, we suspect, he mixed up with the people that put him up to this whole business.”

He added: “I think his father is embarrassed by the whole thing, because that was not the way he brought the boy up. All of us are shocked by it.”

Adam Nossiter contributed reporting from Lisbon, Portugal; Senan Murray from Abuja, Nigeria; Imam Imam from Funtua, Nigeria; and Marlise Simons from Paris.