The Crotch-Bomber and Nidal Hasan Reviews
The White House has released its summary of the intelligence review on the Christmas Crotch Bomber (and here is Obama’s order for corrective action). The big take-away is:
The US Government had sufficient information prior to the attempted December 25 attack to have potentially disrupted the AGAP attack.
But, the summary says, the Watch List system and the Intelligence Community are not broken; they just need to be improved.
All well and good.
But I’m curious by the quick turnaround on this report and the lack of any similar unclassified summary of the report on Nidal Hasan’s successful attack. For that matter, William Webster is still working on his review of the Hasan attack (which I understand to be a follow-up to just this kind of initial review).
Does that mean whatever the review found, preliminarily, could not be published? Meanwhile, the military has just appointed a “sanity board” to review Hasan’s competence to stand trial.
Wow. Brennan and Napalitano are shaken up. bmaz, does Janet normally do that looking at the ceiling thing?
If that was the “big take-away”, the “big throw-away” was:
I sure have a different dog whistle. The big moment that had me yelping and jumping to the point position was when Helen Thomas asked Robert Gibbs: Why…
This sailed over the head of the MSNBC news shows I watch. Now I’m waiting to see if Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert pick up on it. Bingo bingo bingo.
Micheal Scheuer summarized the environment that feeds terrorism the other morning on Washington Journal
“so many more people who hate America”
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/01/04/WJE/A/27963/Michael+Scheuer+Former+CIA+Bin+Laden+Unit+Chief+199699.aspx
I’m reassured no one acted irresponsibly, failed to get out of their chair, talk to someone or phone someone;it was a system failure, and its already happened so it’s OK.
Wasn’t Buscho tasked with closing the open loops, not invented here, not my responsibility mentality. Wasn’t this attitude know for 60 years?
More databases, more hardware, more software, better search engines, no accountability. Our Government inaction. I feel safer now, don’t you?
DISASTER ACCOMPLISHED
Bush was also supposed to defend and protect the Constitution
how’d that work out
the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result
maybe America IS crazy
Two things become apparent.
1) the incoherence of the No Fly List and Terrorist Watch List designations, and airport screening. They talk about the derogatory information necessary to put someone on the Terrorist Watch list, as if that’s what was needed. But in addition to a Terrorist Watch List with a membership on the order of 10,000 as I understand it, we’ve also got a No Fly List with 6 figures worth of names.
Currently, the No Fly List is almost useless. I’ve had friends show up on it. And I don’t mean friends who post on liberal blogs — I wouldn’t be surprised if my own name had shown up. But I’m talking apolitical, anglo 30-somethings. No explanation. And what’s even stranger — how did one of them get off the list? The airline check-in person looked her over, said I can let you through, and did!
But what we seem to need is a lower designation — Terror Watch; No Fly; and Fly With Discretion. The latter would flag people for different handling without actually preventing them from flying. No Fly would mean No Fly, rather than “fly if the woman at the airline counter thinks you look innocent”. And Terror Watch would be an even stronger designation.
2) The rampant need for regional specialists and language specialists. This is not the first time we’ve missed someone because a name was mistransliterated. Abdulmutallab isn’t that tough. In my old office, we used to have a phonetic name-alphabetizer. I know it’s ridiculous, but it actually worked. We handled birth certificates, and it was otherwise difficult to alphabet and then retrieve documents for people who sometimes were born before their family had standardized the spelling of their names. At any rate, for at least 8 years, since I first began googling (or yahooing) the names of Sept. 11 terrorists, and discovered that they were spelled differently in different places, this has been an obvious need. An obituary of the woman who died in the al-Balawi bombing actually cited her ability to index “the various permutations of al Qaeda leaders’ names” as a key and surprising skill. We need to get on top of this. You can’t keep a No Fly List if you don’t have a consistent way to index names coming across from Arabic letters. It’s just silly to bother keeping the list if we haven’t solved this yet.
Hell, we need that for the voting rolls, and for simple Spanish names. That was the biggest problem I saw last year when I worked voter protection for a Detroit precinct with a significant Latino population.
You’re in luck. Well, you would be, except I’m not in Detroit. But I’m now in charge of quality control for the voter rolls here, among other things. :-)
Nigerian passports are in English, the official language. There are no excuses for not getting the name spelled correctly for correlating databases. If you can’t get the real names right, getting false names and alternate names would be even more hopeless.
Where the language (and character sets) are not English, for the identity of the person, I wonder if the system caters to those needs. It goes without saying there will also need to be a bank of people with language skills to check and double check names. Arabic is nothing compared to having to deal with two byte characters (so don’t get into a fight with N Korea). The system needs to be able to deal with identities in other than English and in ways that do not require that the viewers of data be able to read and pronounce some of the identification data.
But before dealing with say, 20 to 30 languages other than English and likely to be required to tie data together for potential actors, they need to be able to correctly enter and identify even the English spelled official identities.
The more I think about this, the angrier I am.
We’ve lost all sorts of rights, we’re torturing people, we’re spying on citizens, we’re holding people WE proclaim as innocence because they might nonetheless be dangerous.
But the father of a terrorist comes in and says “I think he’s a terrorist.” And we do nothing, don’t even revoke the visa, because we fail to recognize how he spells his fucking name?????
If I promise that Dick Cheney can lock me in a dark cell forever on even a hint of impropriety in my background, would he at least agree to try to train embassy personnel to SPELL in the language of the country they’re sent to?? FAAAACK!!!
And they are not willing to draw the boundaries for Israel.
OT – From Jeremy Scahill’s RebelReport blog:
The Hasan attack involved the US Army at Ft. Hood, including most obviously a mid-level officer and psychiatrist working where the Army’s sun doesn’t shine – with the wounded and and the survivors of the dead.
The Crotch Bomber involved systemic problems about the feds inability to share and act on information already in hand. “Improvement” implies nothing to see here, move along. Dr. Hasan’s violent acts succeeded, so that spin won’t wash.
More OT – From Sam Stein over at HuffPo:
Shorter Harry Reid: “Dawn who?”
Is that a fuck you to Obama?
Harry would never say that, would he? *g*
Earl, and Marcy,
I wouldn’t focus too much on the idea of broken vs. reformable. What Obama or his people are doing here is defining what exactly needs to change. The scope of the change needed isn’t as important as the fact that I think they’ve zeroed in on the right thing.
I think by “had sufficient information” and the need for “improvement”, the report is saying the problem isn’t gathering enough info but handling the info we already have.
By zeroing in, they help the public zero in on likely solutions. If our needs were omni-directional, then the claims of the torture apologists, the wire-tappers, etc., become stronger. If the need is better analysis, then we can say – look, the last thing we need is more disinformation from tortured suspects. What we need is people who can recognize that Abdul from Nigeria is the same guy as Abdoel from Indonesia, because of the way one transliterates into Dutch. It helps define the need in constructive ways.
For example, I think it’s interesting that of the three “successful” attacks this year (Hassan, al Balawi and in a sense Abdulmutallab), each seems to have had a presence in our intel system, and two of the three had made known their interest in martyrdom in online forums. The same is true of the Decatur, IL, jihadi. This makes me believe (perhaps naively) that these sorts of attacks aren’t as subtle and difficult to anticipate as one might think.
Maybe the lesson is that terrorists, at least the type with enough knowledge of America to be dangerous to Americans, may most of the time out themselves if we just let them. We’ve been tearing out the foundation of the house looking for where the mice MIGHT get in, when the mice are really just coming in the open window.
Now Marcy, I’m sure you can argue that that implies the system is broken. My point is that on a go-forward basis, if they’re accurately identifying the needs, which I think they are, a new system will inevitably evolve that is more focused on those needs. A great deal of the problem is the maximalist, all-or-nothing, devious-arabs worldview of the Bush/Cheney folks, which led us completely astray in grappling with what type of foe we faced and what we needed to do to address it.
Re the “sanity board” — It’s very difficult to be held non-competent to stand trial. An attorney may have to do this to cover their bases, or to play for time, but basically, outside florid schizophrenia or serious brain damage, one is usually found competent to stand trial.
OT, but does the ABB factory shooting in St. Louis, at least three dead and five wounded, foretell more strife as the middle class and the prospects for its children are thrown down the drain by Democrats and Republicans alike.
According to this report, the shooter was an employee and participant in a current lawsuit against ABB for poorly managing employees retirement funds. The disaffection consequent to corporation predation and poor regulation of current business practices is probably just beginning.
Will Washington subsidize the purchase of more sonic cannons and workplace metal detectors, or work to improve workplace conditions and make management’s responsibilities to its workers more than a smoking room joke?
It’s gonna get worse. There have been gloomier articles recently, but this is the latest I could find. Will keep looking.
O/T and FWIW: Former Bush Deputy Counsel, John Farren, charged with trying to kill his wife. Link.
For this night only:
Roll Tide!
Yet another argument for college football playoffs: These teams sit for 45 days and make tons of mistakes in the biggest game of the year. Each big game has been like this.
What is Texas thinking having McCoy run the option?
Shouldn’t a team that is playing for the national championship have a back-up quarterback who won’t give the game away? Texas is going to wah-wah about losing McCoy, but ‘Bama is beating their butts big-time on both sides of the ball now.
Incredibly non-representative of the best; Boise State would be giving the Tide a match.
So if this game plays out the way it looks now, final AP poll is Alabama, Boise State, Florida for 1-3?
I know, I know, you think Boise should be number 1…
Hah, I was just saying that to my wife. You’d think they’d have two guys preparing side-by-side running that dangerous (for QB’s) option offense.
This game sucks. Alabama is unimpressive. Bring me Boise State. Bring me a playoff.
Alabama is playing much worse than they did in the SEC championship game. Their special teams are trying to give the game away.
Or, alternatively teh Gators are who we thought they were; but the Crimson Tide whupped them and is fortunate they do not have to play Boise State.
Hey counselor… how ya feelin’?
After watching for a while, the game was getting lopsided enough that I decided that I’d rather watch TRMS.
Bob in AZ
Hey
Hendrich humperdink
Or hendrick hubrish
Or whoever
The very clever
New yorker writer commenting on health insur legislation recently
Would love this situation.
Things are complicated
No one should be implicated
Otherwise it’s some kind of informal fallacy.
B.s. Then, b.s. Now.
Specific individuals made specific decisions about health legislation
And about whether the Nigerian crotch rocket was a threat.
I’m no fan of Texas, but just a minute ago we were letting the boys play when ‘Bama dude should have had a flag. That’s a cheap PI flag against Texas.
Gotta hand it to the Longhorns. They got themselves back into this.
There are two things in football that mark a winner:
– playing ferocious defense
And
– running over the other team no
Matter what defense they adopt.
In case you hadn’t noticed
Mark ingram is an extraordinary runner.
One like I haven’t seen since emitt smith.
There is only one thing in football that marks a winner, and that would be the one with more points at the end.
Bmaz-
Two different senses of “winning”
Winning a particular contest
Vs
Winning over a season (several games)