Seems to me that combined efforts of local and federal law officers did a pretty surprisingly good job catching the Times Square bomber. "53 [hours] is a pretty good number," they're saying, if not "Jack Bauer's 24 minutes."
I guess it's okay to say, casually, "My feet aren't a small as Cinderella's." But we keep having to deal with an apparent and curious inability of so many among us to leave sofa and Jack Bauer fantasies long enough to get our brains going. Even President Reagan lost touch with the fact that he'd never fought in World War II. He didn't. He played a soldier in a movie. Kiefer Sutherland almost certainly has had post-binge mornings when he can't even find his toothbrush, not to say the perp -- and all that in 24 minutes.
So 53 hours and change is a pretty damn good record and says something about the ability of our law officers -- from cop on the beat to AG -- to work together.
The New York Times finds two screw-ups in the process that led to the capture of Faisal Shahzad. One has to do with TSA.
One long-planned change in security procedures may reduce the chances of a repeat failure to check an updated no-fly list, officials said. The Transportation Security Administration is taking over the job of checking passenger manifests against the no-fly list under its Secure Flight program.
Such checks are currently being done by the T.S.A. for domestic flights, and the agency is scheduled to be checking all international flights by the end of the year, agency officials said.
Why haven't we been checking no-fly lists for international flights since 2001? Here's a huge Bush-constructed bureaucracy, hundreds of thousands of international flights and no vigilance.
Then there was the airline -- Emirates. It didn't do its job. It didn't check the no-fly list, as requested.
At about 12:30 p.m. on Monday, more certain that Mr. Shahzad was the suspected terrorist, investigators asked the Department of Homeland Security to put him on the no-fly list. Three minutes later, the department sent airlines, including Emirates, an electronic notification that they should check the no-fly list for an update. At about 4:30 p.m., more information was added to the list, including Mr. Shahzad’s passport number, officials said.
Workers at Emirates evidently did not check the list, because at 6:30 p.m., Mr. Shahzad called the airline and booked a flight to Pakistan via Dubai, officials said. At 7:35 p.m., he arrived at the airport, paid cash for his ticket and was given a boarding pass. Airlines are not required to report cash purchases, a Homeland Security official said.
Emirates actually did report Mr. Shahzad’s purchase to the Transportation Security Administration — but only hours later, when he was already in custody, the official said.
The real Jack Bauers are our employees, not free-lancers. As such, they work according to the procedures we decide on, and our decisions are political and largely dependent on pressure from lobbies.
The real hero in the Shahzad case was the New York police officer who put his life on the line. He crawled under what was believed to be a car-turned-live-bomb to get its hidden VIN number before the whole thing was expected to blow. That VIN number kicked off a very focused and thankfully swift identification of the bomber.
The simplicity and directness of the self-directed authoritarian hero appeals to American couch potatoes, but not to Americans who value freedom. We can't have it both ways. Except in our fantasy lives.
