homeland security

This Must Be Why We Teach Kids To Share

04 Jan 2010

Posted by Andrew Samwick

Here's more from Newsweek over the weekend on the details of the breakdown in U.S. security to prevent the attempted attack on Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day:

Former U.S law-enforcement and intelligence officials are scathing about the U.S. government’s handling of pre-Christmas intelligence about Abdulmutallab and the prospect of a possible attack from Yemen. “The system should have been lighting up like a Christmas tree,” said Ali Soufan, a former senior FBI counterterrorism agent who spent years tracking Qaeda suspects in Yemen (and often battled with the CIA over information sharing).

When Abdulmutallab’s father visited the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, in November to report his concerns that his son might have been involved with Islamic extremists in Yemen, the FBI had no representative at the meeting; the FBI maintains an attaché only in Lagos on the southern coast, not in Abuja, the capital. But the CIA, which did have an officer present who wrote up a report on the meeting, never told the FBI about Abdulmutallab.

I think our anti-terrorism systems focuses too much on technology and too little on the terrorists themselves.

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homeland security

Some Comedy to Ring in the New Year

03 Jan 2010

Posted by Andrew Samwick

Comes to us courtesy of Frances Townsend, who served as Assistant to President George W. Bush for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, in last week's Washington Post:

The Obama administration needs to take a clear, tough line with Yemen: Take care of the terrorism problem within your borders so you are no longer a threat to the United States and our allies in the region, or allow the international community to come in and clean it up for you. The time for polite diplomacy is long past.

I couldn't stop laughing when I read this in my local paper. To what international community is she referring? The one still bogged down in Afghanistan? The one that hung together so well in Iraq?

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