I am not buying this explanation that the apparatchik that inadvertently dropped a letter from Abdulmutallab's name is the reason he wasn’t flagged and prevented from boarding flight 253. I am incredulous that this small screw-up prevented the U.S. from revoking his visa. It’s also sticking in my craw that the traditional media has now settled on the single point that Abdulmutallab had a US visa issued to him, but no one will confirm that he had it with him at any airport that he passed through, including the airport in Amsterdam. That is important, because if he did not, that should have prevented him from boarding the plane. If the visa was expired, as the Yemeni government claims, that should have also prevented his boarding the flight. In the databases as large and sophisticated as the ones the ‘letter agencies’ must maintain, it just isn’t possible that this young man’s name was missed for the reason they're telling us. Follow me over the fold, and I’ll explain why.
In my line of work, I have to run people’s names through local, state and federal databases. All of them use something called "soundex", and there are several different computer programs that execute this function. While I don’t know specifically which one we’re using in our local database, the point is, everyone is using a soundex function in some form, regardless of agency or department, state or national.
For instance, if the last name "Jones" is entered into a search database, your results will not only include every "Jones", but every name that sounds and looks like it as well: Johnson, Johnsen, Johnston, Johnsten, Johnstone, Jensen, Johns, Jonas, Johann, etc. If I accidentally drop a letter from "Jones", I would still get the name "Jones" and all of the other variations. Results can be narrowed by state or country of birth, race, age or birthdate; either singly, or all together if these factors are known. I admit I don’t know what would happen if I dropped the 'J', but unless you can think of a bunch of surnames that look and sound like "Ones", experience tells me that I would quickly recognize an error. Nevertheless, losing any of the other 4 letters would still yield results as I’ve described.
Whether the person who misspelled Abdulmutallab’s name was the operator who searched for his name to check his status, or the operator who originally entered the stored data, it still should have appeared as a result, if not an actual 'hit', particularly with a 13-letter last name, even if one letter was dropped, and two transposed. This is all under the assumption, of course, that his name had actually been entered into the database in the first place, or that the name had actually been searched for. The report says yes to both, but I’m still dubious. How about telling us which letter was dropped? Maybe I'd like to try running this name through the system myself, just to see what happens. Nah, not really. I'd probably just get my ass in trouble. But this isn't the only reason I'm skeptical of this report.
On page 5 of the summary under VISA ISSUE, it says,
Mr. Abdulmutallab possessed a U.S. visa, but this fact was not correlated with the concerns of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father about Mr. Abdulmutallab’s potential radicalization.
So he possessed a U.S. visa. A fact, they say. But when was the fact of this visa discovered? Soon after Abdulmutallab’s father turned him in, or after flight 253 landed in Detroit? Was his visa valid, or not? Can a visa be said to be valid if it's expired?
The Summary goes on to say
A misspelling of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name initially resulted in the State Department believing he did not have a valid U.S. visa.
The State Department? I thought Abdulmutallab’s father went to the CIA to report his son. Why has the State Department been dropped in the middle of this?
The last sentence under Visa Issue
A determination to revoke his visa, however, would have only occurred if there had been a successful integration of intelligence by the CT community, resulting in his being watchlisted.
Only three little sentences, and I still feel as though I need a translation. I think it says, "We never took old man Abdulmutallab seriously, so we didn’t look very hard for other leads or information about his son. Anyway, some dumbshit spelled the kids name wrong, so we couldn’t find him in our database and then we said `Whew! Thank god he doesn’t have a U.S. visa! Can’t get into the USA without one of those!’ We probably would have revoked his visa if our tech capabilities had allowed us to find out he had one. We tried to integrate all our intelligence to correct this, but we were unsuccessful and gave up."
If someone has a better translation, let's hear it.
The visa issue is barely touched upon, and what little there was of it I found it to be uninformative and confusing. The cynic in me says this is deliberate. I think that this, the smallest part of the report, will be revisited in spite of and because of the obfuscation.
It is inconceivable to me that the database(s) used by the FBI, CIA, DHS, CBP, ICE, TSA and the State Department, were not, by necessity, integrated with each other, even if only through overlapping databases and not through full-access, full-search capabilities at each agency. The Summary of the White House Review states that the problems of dataset integration had largely been overcome after the 9-11 attack, and further acknowledges that "the intentional redundancy in the system should have added an additional layer of protection in uncovering the plot like the failed attack on December 25." It says that 'information sharing' was not part of the failure and that anyone who needed the information was not prevented access to it. Although Abdulmutallab was not on the no-fly list, he was in other databases (to include the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment) as a person to be watched, but he didn’t make it to the no-fly list because
Mr. Abdulmutallab did not meet the minimum derogatory standard to watchlist
. What the fuck?
- He is foreign 2. He is Muslim 3. His own father claimed he might have been radicalized by AQ 4. He’d recently been in Yemen.
That isn’t derogatory enough? What utter bullshit! What will they tell us next? "No one could have predicted a guy would hide a bomb in his drawers." ???
From the President's Directive on Corrective Actions
I am directing Mr. Brennan to work with departments and agencies and the Office of Management and Budget on resource requirements that are necessary to address the shortcomings uncovered by our review.
If these shortcomings exist now, then they existed after BushCo took office as well, and for the entire duration of his administration. This can't be something that just happened after Obama took office. Can it?
...I will ask my Intelligence Advisory Board to look at broader analytic and intelligence issues associated with this incident, including how to meet the challenge associated with exploiting the ever-increasing volume of information available to the Intelligence Community.
Ok, let me see if I can get this straight. The challenge of efficiently utilizing huge amounts of stored information wasn’t achieved after Bush/Cheney took office, it wasn’t achieved after 9/11, and still not after the shoe-bomber, or at any time during that administration. Well, of course it wasn’t. After all, the Bush administration was a huge collection of incompetent boobs, right? I mean, it’s not like they were spying on us all that time, collecting, collating and categorizing massive amounts of information for the last 8 years, right? They must have been too busy looting the treasury, looking for any “terrorists” that might put a dent in that.
And now, President Obama has to release a Directive on Corrective Actions, which says, essentially, for these agencies to do their fucking jobs! Just read both of these documents. It sounds like one giant clusterfuck of non-cooperation, stupidity and laziness, hidden behind a fusillade of double-speak and an alphabet soup of acronyms.
What do we get by way of explanation? The same old platitudes, trotted out in the report, and in the President’s speech. "Mistakes were made", "we couldn’t connect the dots", "systemic failure", "we must do better", "our technology infrastructure needs fixing". The only new thing we’ve heard is "the buck stops with me" (not something W ever said), and all of it designed to absolve every person below the President of responsibility. But why? Why can’t we know who the idiots are that fucked this up? We was robbed!
I’m calling bullshit on the whole thing. The buck stops with Obama so we won’t find out who screwed the pooch. The investigations won’t need to delve too deeply, because the President is taking responsibility, and he and his team already know what needs to be done to fix the problems. Now move along.
Don’t give me any shit about this being divisive or unsupportive of the President. We should all stand together in demanding accountability, and this preview doesn’t even come close. If this doesn’t raise even more questions, you’re not paying attention.
I am tired of being lied to.