Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano may have given conservatives a great new t-shirt idea yesterday by claiming that the system "worked like clockwork" once the flight 253 incident had occurred (a disclaimer that rendered the statement meaningless), but there may actually be some truth to the notion that the system worked. (more...)

As everyone knows by now Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigeran businessman who attempted to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, was already on a U.S. government watch list, thanks in part to the fact his father reported him to the U.S. Government. What is less clear is how someone on a watch list, who was denied a visa by the British, managed to get on a States-bound plane without being subjected to increased security (or any?). This explanation from a senior administration official, via Politico, may go some ways to answering that question: There's a lot of bureaucracy involved.

'There are over 400,000 individuals in the Terrorist Screening Data Base (TSDB), the main identities database within the U.S. Government for international terrorism. The TSDB is a subset of the 550,000 individuals contained in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), which is the Intelligence Community's central repository of information on known and suspected international terrorists. Less than 4,000 of the names in the TSDB are on the 'No Fly' list and another 14,000 names are on the 'Selectee' list, which calls for mandatory secondary screening. There are established criteria for both the no fly and selectee lists. After the suspect's father spoke to the US Embassy in Lagos, Nigeria the US government took action and shared the information with relevant agencies across the government which resulted in a TIDE record being created for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in November 2009. It was decided that there was insufficient information at that time based on existing watch list criteria to include him in the terrorist watch list, the no fly list or the mandatory secondary screening list, thus he was not 'watch-listed' as of 25 December 2009.'

Emphasis mine, because that is the sort of disclosure that is alternately going to result in accusations of too much political correctness at play, and/or the evils of government bureaucracy, or both (ahem, Glenn Beck). Press Secretary Robert Gibbs appeared to acknowledge the bureaucracy part at least on This Week yesterday noting that "these procedures are several years old” and Thursday's incident had "precipitated both a watch listing review and a detection capabilities review" neither of which sound like the sort of thing that bear results anytime soon. So in the meantime probably be prepared for excess random security restrictions and extra, extra long lineups, and at least a few false alarms. Pic via.

video The next time the White House announces to the press that they expect a quiet holiday with no news it perhaps might be a good time to take cover. After a contentious summer and fall spent arguing over the health care bill, and for a short while Afghanistan, no doubt President Obama was looking forward to a nice quiet week...so much for that! Once the dust had settled after Thursday's averted terror attack on Northwest Flight 253 (and according to ABC News has Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab been successful he could have blown up the whole plane) it took less than a day for the finger pointing to start. (more...)

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Hot on the heels of Janet Napolitano's "The system worked like clockwork" appearance on This Week, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs faced questions from Jake Tapper, who cut through the word blizzard and got to the heart of the issue. If the flight 253 suspect was on a watch list, who was watching him? Gibbs' response was equally on target.

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Another incident has been reported on Northwest Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, CNN and BNO News are reporting. Details are still coming in, but here's the information that's available thus far, as gleaned from Twitter. (more...)

video Jake Tapper interviewed DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on ABC's This Week, giving an early indicator of what the administration's narrative on Flight 523 will be. Caught between the need to reassure a jumpy public, political opponents drooling at the chance to score points, and an unwillingness to tip our hand to those who would do us harm, Napolitano had her work cut out for her. Even given those factors, the Secretary's overarching message was tone deaf, to say the least. Napolitano sold the notion that the system worked, hitting the talking point several times:

I think the important thing to recognize here is that once this incident occurred, everything happened that should have. The passengers reacted correctly, the crew reacted correctly, within an hour to 90 minutes, all 128 flights in the air had been notified. And those flights already had taken mitigation measures on the off-chance that there was somebody else also flying with some sort of destructive intent. So the system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days.

Tapper followed up by saying "(Y)ou keep saying everybody acted the way they were supposed to. Clearly the passengers and the crew of that Northwest Airlines flight did. But I think there are questions about whether everybody in the U.S. government did." Napolitano was undeterred:

Now once this incident occurred, everything went according to clockwork. Not only sharing throughout the air industry, but also sharing with state and local law enforcement, products were going out on Christmas Day, they went out yesterday, and also to the industry to make sure that the traveling public remains safe.

So, a man on a really long terrorism list carries an incendiary device onto an airplane, ignites it in midair, the detonator fails, the passengers jump the flame-crotched suspect, and he is subdued/extinguished. As Hannibal Smith would say, "I love it when a plan comes together." Maybe she meant to say that it worked like "A Clockwork Orange." In fairness, that's not exactly what Napolitano said, but that's the effect. She prefaced it all by saying "Once this incident occurred," which is a lot like bragging about how well Trojans work after your girlfriend is pregnant. Tapper interviewed Press Secretary Robert Gibbs next, and he wisely abandoned Napolitano's breathtakingly clueless line. Here's the clip:

video There may have been a brief reprieve because it did happen on Christmas, but make no mistake: the politicizing of the attempted attack on Northwest airlines flight 253 has begun. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) criticized President Obama on CNN Saturday, questioning the response of the administration in the aftermath of the potentially deadly incident. (more...)

"Before stepping into the boxing ring for a friendly match with Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the one thing you need to know is that he will, in fact, punch you in the face."

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