Covering Up The Obama Failure: What We Still Don't Know About The Christmas Terrorist Attack
Posted at Hugh Hewitt's blog:
Here are links to today's lead stories on the Christmas terrorist attack from the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The key graphs come at the very end of the Times' story:
Mr. Mutallab visited the embassy on Nov. 19 and told officials his son had been radicalized, was missing and might be in Yemen, said a State Department spokesman, P. J. Crowley. Mr. Crowley said that Mr. Mutallab did not say he believed his son planned to attack Americans, but that he expressed general concern about his radical views.
The information was taken seriously, Mr. Crowley said, but was judged insufficient to warrant revoking Mr. Abdulmutallab’s visa, although his file was flagged for investigation if he reapplied. Embassy officials representing several security agencies discussed the information on Nov. 20 and sent a cable to Washington. His name was added to a database of 550,000 names with suspicion of terrorism ties, but it did not go onto the 4,000-person no-fly list.
Here's part of the Post's account:
Authorities said there was no reason to suspect Abdulmutallab of dangerous activity until his father visited the embassy in Abuja on Nov. 19. The next day, under a program called Visa Viper, mandated by Congress to ensure all terrorism-related information is promptly reported to Washington, the embassy sent a cable saying the father was "concerned that his son was falling under the influence of religious extremists in Yemen," a State Department official said.
The State Department, under existing procedures, passed the Viper information to the National Counterterrorism Center for entry in its terrorism database. Neither the State Department nor the NCTC, officials said Monday, checked to see if Abdulmutallab had ever entered the United States or had a valid entry visa -- information readily available in separate consular and immigration databases. "It's not for us to review that," the State Department official said.
The Post noted earlier in its story that London authorities had placed Abdulmutallab on a watch list last May.
The key, and as-yet-unanswered-and-apparently-unasked, questions are obvious: What does it take to get on to the "no fly" list? Who dropped the ball on the "Visa Viper" team? To whom did the terrorist's father speak in Nigeria and at what length? What sort of information was passed back to the U.S. in the cable --a line, a paragraph, an "urgent urgent" warning in big red block letters?
In short: What happened? Where are the details? The names of thos involved and the hour at which they failed to act?
Who is running the DHS effort in Amsterdam? Who is supposed to be watching the people London is watching as they go to and from the al Qaeda-friendly confines of Yemen? Do we even share information with Great Britain anymore or is the president's obvious antipathy for England mirrored down the line of the entire executive branch?
Ask yourself what the response of the nation's elite media would be if this had happened in December, 2007 and George Bush was at his ranch? Would the press lazily accept a two minute statement followed by golf? Would Bush's DHS chief Michael Chertoff's bland assurance that "the system worked" followed by a retraction the next day be absent from the news or be running on a near-endless loop? Would demands for Secretary Rice's head be heard from the left? Would we have anonymous quotes from "senior Adminsitration officials" and leaks from CIA operatives?
Or would we have the sort of non-coverage President Obama is benefitting from?...
Read the rest: http://www.hughhewitt.com/blog/g/303e2a34-c023-49e5-be6d-a6c86dacdea6
Coverage in British press--better than that in America: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/6904119/Detroit-terror-attack-Umar-Farouk-Abdulmutallab-defended-911.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6970574.ece
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