The Redhunter

What we are focused on is making sure that the air environment remains safe, that people are confident when they travel. And one thing I'd like to point out is that the system worked. Everybody played an important role here. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action. Within literally an hour to 90 minutes of the incident occurring, all 128 flights in the air had been notified to take some special measures in light of what had occurred on the Northwest Airlines flight. We instituted new measures on the ground and at screening areas, both here in the United States and in Europe, where this flight originated.

So the whole process of making sure that we respond properly, correctly and effectively went very smoothly.

Ok, I get her point that "the system" she was talking about was after the attack, but this misses the point spectacularly. Once the terrorist got on the plane with his bomb, the system had failed. That's the part of "the system" that counts the most. Sure, let's take action to prevent future attacks, but at best Napolitano sounded stupid in her initial remarks, at worst completely out of touch.

The Bush-Era DHS

Yes Bush-era DHS Secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Cherthoff left a lot to be desired. The latter, especially, was attacked up one side and down the other by conservatives. So the "well what about George Bush this" and "What about George Bush that" doesn't carry any water with me.

You didn't have to go far on right-wing talk radio to hear Cherthoff in particular ridiculed for various things, in particular his lack of enthusiasm for a fence along the Mexican border to keep out illegals. We weren't happy with his anti-terror policies either, and he came under a fair amount of criticism from the right on that score too.

More, two wrongs don't make a right. It's like the argument that because George Bush drove up the deficit, conservatives and Republicans have no right to criticize Obama for doing the same.

Further, for all those liberals who want to tell me that Obama inherited Bush's security regime, it's been almost a year since our new president has been in office. I thought he was going to "change the world," institute "change" and all that. Heck, from some of the stuff I heard I thought he was going to move the mountains and calm the seas. Turns out he can't even be bothered to tighten up security on our airlines.

Security Failures

Don't take it from me, though, take it from two liberal newspapers. First up is the New York Times. In a story titled Questions on Why Suspect Wasn't Stopped:

When a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official phoned the American Embassy in Abuja in October with a warning that his son had developed radical views, had disappeared and might have traveled to Yemen, embassy officials did not revoke the young man's visa to enter the United States, which was good until June 2010.

Instead, officials said Sunday, they marked the file of the son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa. And when they passed the information on to Washington, Mr. Abdulmutallab's name was added to 550,000 others with some alleged terrorist connections -- but not to the no-fly list. That meant no flags were raised when he used cash to buy a ticket to the United States and boarded a plane, checking no bags.

Now that Mr. Abdulmutallab is charged with trying to blow up a transcontinental airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, some members of Congress are urgently questioning why, eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks, security measures still cannot keep makeshift bombs off airliners...

Officials in several countries, meanwhile, worked to retrace Mr. Abdulmutallab's path and to look for security holes. In Nigeria, officials said he arrived in Lagos on Christmas Eve, just hours before departing for Amsterdam. American officials were tracking his travels to Yemen, and Scotland Yard investigators were checking on his connections in London, where he studied from 2005 to 2008 at University College London and was president of the Islamic Society.

Obama administration officials scrambled to portray the episode, in which passengers and flight attendants subdued Mr. Abdulmutallab and doused the fire he had started, as a test that the air safety system passed.

"The system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days," Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary said, in an interview on "This Week" on ABC. Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, used nearly the same language on "Face the Nation" on CBS, saying that "in many ways, this system has worked."

But counterterrorism experts and members of Congress were hardly willing to praise what they said was a security system that had proved to be not nimble enough to respond to the ever-creative techniques devised by would-be terrorists.

Here again, the idea that "the air safety system passed" it's test is lunacy. As I said above, the system failed the minute Abdulmutallab got on the plane with his bomb. That id didn't destroy the aircraft and kill everyone on board was sheer luck.

Next we have an editorial in the Washington Post titled Unconnected Dots, Yet Again, on a Terror Attempt:

THE THWARTED Christmas Day airplane bombing raises three causes for alarm. First, it illustrates a screening system that remains porous enough to let a suspect board with the same explosive shoe-bomber Richard Reid attempted to use in 2001. Second, it exposes a terrorism bureaucracy too clumsy to catapult the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, at least to a higher level of preflight scrutiny after his father came forward with warnings that he might pose a danger. Third, if it is true that the suspect received explosives training from al-Qaeda in Yemen, the incident underscores the emergence of that troubled nation as a training ground for terrorists. To that initial list, we would add a fourth: the disturbingly defensive reaction of the Obama administration.

No screening system can be foolproof, and every system must balance security against the need to allow an acceptably free flow of travel. But the system apparently failed in the case of Mr. Abdulmutallab in significant part because available technologies were not employed. The explosive PETN, pentaerythritol tetranitrate, that Mr. Abdulmutallab allegedly carried would not be found through normal X-rays or metal detectors. However, it is detectable by bomb-sniffing dogs, by "sniffer" technology that blows particles off travelers, or by swabbing passengers for traces of explosives; full-body imaging might also have been helpful. Mr. Abdulmutallab does not appear to have undergone any such screening in Lagos, where his travel started, or in Amsterdam, where he boarded the Northwest flight for Detroit. Given the continuing threat, it may be necessary to reexamine the need for such intensive screening before flights are cleared for the United States.

More disturbing is the apparent failure of U.S. authorities to respond swiftly and seriously to warnings by Mr. Abdulmutallab's father about his son's "radicalization and associations" with Islamist extremists. As the recently retired chairman of a major Nigerian bank, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab was a credible source; his alert to Nigerian and U.S. Embassy officials in Lagos about his son's increasingly militant views should have been enough to prompt an immediate review of Mr. Mutallab's multiple-entry visa and, at a minimum, to have him flagged for extra security precautions. The notion that there was "insufficient derogatory information available" to do more than add Mr. Abdulmutallab's name to a broad terror watch list, as the administration suggested, is infuriating. This was not an American citizen entitled to due-process protections and the right to enter the country at will. How much more derogatory does information have to be than a father's warning that his son is dabbling in radical Islam?

Ouch.