Criminal Negligence or Fear of Political Incorrectness

Unbe­liev­able!  Imag­ine the fol­low­ing scenario:

• to make a lit­tle extra cash you rent a room in your house
• a nice, quiet young man rents a room in your house
• the young man’s father tells you the young man might blow up your house and to keep an eye on him
• you think, “Oh, fathers all say those sort of things.”
• when the young man arrives you take no spe­cial mea­sures to ensure that he isn’t car­ry­ing bombs or other goodies.

Make sense to you?  It does to Home­land Secu­rity.  After 9–11, the Shoe Bomber, the Heathrow Plot, and hun­dreds of other inci­dents that I don’t know about this isn’t lax; it’s crim­i­nal negligence.

The high explo­sive Abdul­mu­tal­lab used was iden­ti­fied by the FBI as Pen­taery­thri­tol, bet­ter known as PETN – a major com­po­nent of Sem­tex. He injected a det­o­nat­ing liq­uid into the PETN with a syringe, but the bomb failed to explode.

The rev­e­la­tion of Abdulmutallab’s back­ground has con­founded ter­ror experts. Dr Mag­nus Ranstorp of the Cen­ter for Asym­met­ric Threat Stud­ies at the Swedish National Defence Col­lege said that the attempted bomb­ing “didn’t square”.

“On the one hand, it seems he’s been on the ter­ror watch list but not on the no-​​fly list,” he said. “That doesn’t square because the Amer­i­can Depart­ment for Home­land Secu­rity has pretty strin­gent data-​​mining capa­bil­ity. I don’t under­stand how he had a valid visa if he was known on the ter­ror watch list.

Besides the experts being con­founded there was another fac­tor at work:  the Fly­ing Imam fac­tor.  The air­line peo­ple so ter­ri­fied of sin­gling out a Mus­lim or a minor­ity for spe­cial atten­tion that they’d rather take their chances (a chance with, per­haps, low prob­a­bil­ity but with ter­ri­bly high stakes) rather than face a swarm of lawyers financed by CAIR or some sim­i­lar group?

One thing con­found­ing the experts is this terrorist’s silver-​​spoon back­ground. His priv­i­leged school­ing.  His res­i­dence: a man­sion.  They just can’t, look­ing at every­thing they can find about this kid’s back­ground, find any­thing that would sug­gest that he might be a suicide-​​bomb ter­ror­ist.  Not one thing.

Read the story and see if you can guess .

(hint:  it starts with an m or an i)

And if you think I’m being a lit­tle hard on Janet Napoli­tano and her Depart­ment of Home­land Inse­cu­rity here’s a con­cur­ring opin­ion that makes mine seem like a love tap.

Embar­rass­ingly for the Wash­ing­ton, Lagos air­port had recently been given the “all clear” by the US’s Trans­porta­tion Secu­rity Admin­is­tra­tion, an agency estab­lished in the wake of the ⁹⁄₁₁ attacks which was sup­posed to improve the secu­rity on Amer­i­can airliners.

STILL want these bureau­crats con­trol­ling your body?

Copy­right secured by Digiprove © 2009

Tags: Homeland Security, intelligence, terrorist