A lot of trouble starts in Yemen -- now often referred to as "another failed state." A friend suggested yesterday that the US simply close the door to travelers from Yemen. Failed or not, Yemen and the US have a partnership.
Yemeni fighter jets, acting on intelligence provided in part by the United States, struck what the Yemeni government said was a meeting of operatives from Al Qaeda early Thursday morning, and officials suggested that a radical cleric linked to the suspect in the Fort Hood shootings might have been among the 30 people killed.
A statement by the Yemeni Embassy in Washington said the target of the airstrike was a gathering of “scores” of Qaeda members from Yemen and other countries, including the network’s two top leaders in Yemen, in a remote corner of in the country’s south. The statement said the radical cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, was “presumed to be at the site.”
It could take days for investigators to sift through the rubble to identify the dead, and intelligence officials in the United States could not immediately confirm whether Mr. Awlaki, who was born in the United States, or any Qaeda members were among those killed. ...NYT
That's from a report dated 12/24 and published a day later in the New York Times, a little before the Detroit airliner bomber boarded the plane in Amsterdam.
The little scene in Schipol airport is interesting. Here's an excerpt from an interview on NPR yesterday afternoon.
Did someone help Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab get onboard the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit? Well, according to two American passengers on Flight 253, an older man - tall and elegantly dressed - accompanied the young Nigerian to a counter before boarding. And they say the older man explained to a woman at the counter that the younger man had no passport. Kurt and Lori Haskell were on their way back from a safari vacation in East Africa. They're in law practice together in Taylor, Michigan.
And Mr. Haskell joins us now from there. Kurt Haskell, when and where did you see these two men together?
Mr. KURT HASKELL (Attorney): I saw them just before we boarded at the Amsterdam airport near the final ticket agent.
SIEGEL: And the younger man, the Nigerian man, you later recognized at the end of this entire thing in Detroit?
Mr. HASKELL: Right. He was the one that tried to blow up our plane a few hours later.
SIEGEL: And who is the older man or what did he look like?
Mr. HASKELL: Well, nobody knows who he is. He was a wealthy-looking Indian man, maybe around age 50. He had a suit on. And, you know, he's the one that tried to get the terrorist onto the plane without a passport.
SIEGEL: What do you mean without a passport? He was...
Mr. HASKELL: Well, what I saw specifically was the two men go to the ticket agent counter together. Only the Indian man spoke and what the Indian man said was this man needs to board the plane and he doesn't have a passport. And the ticket agent then responded, well, you need a passport to board the plane. And the Indian man said, well, he's from Sudan and we do this all the time. And the ticket agent then responded, well, you'll need to speak to my manager and pointed the two down a hallway to speak to her manager.
SIEGEL: Now, did this older man, did he appear to work for the airport or the airline or security? Did he have any badge on him identifying himself?
Mr. HASKELL: I can't say 100 percent for sure. But to me, he didn't appear that way. He appeared to be maybe trying to bully the ticket agent into letting this man on. And it seemed he was more some kind of authority figure to the terrorist.
SIEGEL: You saw the young - as it turned out - not Sudanese, but Nigerian man at the end of all this when he was taken off the plane, I guess.
Mr. HASKELL: Correct.
SIEGEL: Did you see the older man, the man you described as an apparently well-to-do Indian man later?
Mr. HASKELL: No, I never saw him again. He was not on our plane.
SIEGEL: The point where you were in the airport, could one have gotten there without a passport? Did you have to show your passport when you change planes, say, from East Africa?
Mr. HASKELL: Yes, we did. Yes, we did.
SIEGEL: So, did it make sense to you that somebody could have been at the counter without having demonstrated he had a passport already?
Mr. HASKELL: If all procedures were correctly followed, he shouldn't have been there. But I really question whether they were or not.
SIEGEL: You don't know if this older man was in cahoots with the younger man or whether he'd been brought into it by the younger man to get him on the plane.
Mr. HASKELL: It appeared to me they were, you know, together.
SIEGEL: It looked like they were together, huh?
Mr. HASKELL: Yeah.
Over the past seven years or so, Bush's Department of Homeland Security has not been successful in tightening up security in many areas. A lot of money has been spent; a lot of time has gone by; and a lot of deadly mistakes have been made.
A review of government audits and interviews with experts inside and outside the government also shows that the system has been slow to make even bigger changes because of a balky bureaucracy, fickle politics and, at times, airline industry opposition. It has also squandered tens of millions of dollars on faulty technology, like high-tech “puffer” machines that repeatedly broke down and flunked the most basic test: they failed to detect some explosives.
As a result, the government has delayed putting in place some of the most important recommendations from the Sept. 11 commission report, which examined the missteps that led to attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.For example, the government has yet to fully deploy a sophisticated method of matching passenger names with terrorist watch lists. And it has still not finished changes that would make it harder for terrorists to sneak bombs into airplane cargo holds, according to government reports. ...NYT
Some of this can be attributed to privacy laws in other countries which take care to preserve citizens' privacy as well as their security. I suspect the intrusions into Americans' privacy by their government is as much or more of problem than we believe. Somehow our government has managed to diminish our privacy rights, set up a new bureaucracy -- "Homeland Security" -- with a name reminiscent government departments in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and has spent $40 billion on airline security systems that don't work.
Did our alliance with Yemen have anything to do with the Detroit incident? Would it be more effective to trim our own bureacracy or "close the door" on Yemen? How is it that our communications with Dutch airline security break down -- or did they? Why do we add more and more "balky bureaucracy" when we have learned long ago that it doesn't add to our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness?
