LAST CHRISTMAS Day, the United States was just three minutes away from another tragedy of unmitigated horror. Once again, terrorists breached our security and nearly succeeded in turning yet one more passenger aircraft into an instrument of death and destruction. Had it not been for the malfunctioning of a cleverly disguised and detonated explosive device concealed in the bomber's underwear, and the alert passengers and flight crew who subdued him, America would have fallen victim to the worst terrorist attack since September 11, 2001.
The bomber, a twenty-three-year-old Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had recently graduated from University College London-one of the UK's most prestigious schools. He defied the conventional wisdom about the stereotypical suicide terrorist being poor, uneducated and provincial. Not only did he hold a degree, he was cosmopolitan-having lived abroad, Abdulmutallab was at ease traversing the globe without arousing suspicion-and he was the son of a wealthy banker and former Nigerian government official. Abdulmutallab was radicalized, recruited, trained and deployed in remarkably quick succession-a rapidity that was also unexpected and thus surprised counterterrorism experts.
How and why he joined al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) remains a mystery. However, suspicions have continually focused on the role played by an American-born Muslim cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki who fled to Yemen some years ago.
Abdulmutallab's attempted attack shook the U.S. national-security structure to its foundations, prompting the most extensive government review of our terrorism defenses since the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security seven years ago and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act that six years ago created the National Counterterrorism Center and Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
But, consider the following direct quotes from one of America's most senior counterterrorism officials, made at a closed meeting I attended in early January to discuss the Christmas Day plot and the state of America's preparedness for terrorism.
On our inability to foresee the attack:
We thought they would attack our embassy in Yemen or Saudi Arabia. The puzzle pieces didn't fit into an attack on the homeland.
There was no intelligence of an attack in the United States, despite the "noise" picked up in the Arabian Peninsula.
AQAP was looked upon as a lethal organization, but one focused [only] on the Arabian Peninsula.
We were looking at FATA [the Federally Administered Tribal Areas] as the incubator of the threat. Not at Yemen.
On the ineffectiveness of the post-9/11 reforms:
Information existed in the IC [intelligence community] that should have allowed us to identify him.
It's not a technology issue, but an untrained-people issue.
CBP [Customs and Border Protection] officers were waiting to arrest him when the plane landed because the P3B TIDE1 protocol did not exist to pull him aside in Amsterdam.
His name was misspelled by the embassy officer who flagged him, and we did not have the software to reconcile the two different versions of the same last name.
And, finally, on the state of our counterterrorism capabilities:
We have an outstanding record of accomplishment, and the American people should feel good about what we have achieved since 9/11.
It is the same line of argument other administration officials have told the media and Sunday talk-show hosts ever since. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano initially enthused that the "system . . . worked really very, very smoothly." White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs similarly assured Americans that the administration was "tak[ing] our fight to those that seek to do us harm" as if that were sufficient compensation for one of the most serious breaches of U.S. security since the September 11 attacks. And, a front-page New York Times article on January 18, 2010, titled "Review of Jet Bomb Plot Shows More Missed Clues," was still reporting weeks later that "Counterterrorism officials assumed that the militants were not sophisticated or ambitious enough to send operatives into the United States."
If Americans are dissatisfied with any of the above explanations, then they doubtless will be further discomforted by another New York Times article, recounting how Mikey Hicks, an eight-year-old third grader from Clifton, New Jersey, has been regularly subjected to secondary screening-including full-body searches and extended questioning-by Transportation Security Administration officials whenever he flies.
And if all this sounds, in the words of immortal baseball player and sage Yogi Berra, like "déjà vu all over again"-except that it's May 2010 and not August 2001-then the inevitable conclusion, of course, is that none of the government's explanations are even remotely acceptable. And even more alarming, despite Washington's assurances to the contrary, the homeland is not particularly safe.
