Questions mount over attempt to bomb Detroit-bound jetliner

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Questions mount over attempt to bomb Detroit-bound jetliner
By Patrick Martin
4 January 2010

Ten days after the failed attempt to explode a bomb onboard Northwest
Flight 253 as it approached Detroit—an action that, if successful,
would have killed nearly 300 people—there are mounting questions about
the actions of US government agencies.

According to the official story, propagated by the Obama
administration and uncritically parroted by the US media, the various
components of the US national security apparatus were incapable of
bringing together the following known facts:

• In May, the British government withdrew its student visa for Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian who had studied at University
College, London, and placed him on a watch list, barring him from
reentering the country.
• In August, US intelligence agencies learned of Al Qaeda discussions
of an operation against a US target to be organized from Yemen, using
a “Nigerian.”
• On November 19, the father of Abdulmutallab, a prominent Nigerian
banker, visited the US embassy in Abuja and told State Department and
CIA personnel that his son had fallen under the influence of radical
Islamists, gone to join them in Yemen, and broken off contact with his
family.
• Based on the father’s report, State Department and CIA officers at
the embassy informed Washington on November 20 and a security file was
opened on Abdulmutallab at the National Counterterrorism Center, the
main Washington clearinghouse for terrorism information.
• On December 16, Abdulmutallab visited a ticket office in Ghana and
paid $2,831 in cash for a ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight from
Lagos through Amsterdam to Detroit, landing on Christmas Day.
• On December 25, Abdulmutallab boarded the flight in Amsterdam with
only a carry-on bag for a trans-Atlantic journey. Following standard
procedure, the US Department of Homeland Security was notified at
least an hour before departure that he was a passenger on the flight.

No intelligent person can believe the official US government account
of its failure to stop the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines
Flight 253. The claim that US intelligence agencies were unable to
detect the bomb plot, despite so many warnings months in advance, is
simply not credible.

The official discussion repeats the same rhetorical trope employed to
cover up the role of US intelligence agencies before the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001—that they failed to “connect the dots.”
This metaphor suggests a highly abstruse process in which many small
details, each seemingly innocent in itself, are correlated through
sophisticated analysis by experts familiar with the patterns of
terrorist operations.

No such operation was required to detect the Northwest Airlines bomb
plot. The facts listed above were a series of fire alarms, each
sufficient in itself to give the alert. To stop Abdulmuttalab from
boarding the US-bound jetliner was a routine police matter, one that
would ordinarily be executed without difficulty by the government of
any middle-sized country, let alone by the most powerful
military/intelligence apparatus on the planet.

If the Nigerian was allowed to board the jet in Amsterdam, it was
because at some level within the US military/intelligence apparatus,
the decision was made to allow him to do so.

The real failure to “connect the dots” is the refusal to draw any
conclusions from the inaction of the US intelligence apparatus. Who
made the decision not to act? Why did they make this decision? Was the
intention that the would-be bo mber succeed or fail? Was it a
deliberate attempt to undermine the Obama administration? Was it a
deliberate attempt to provide a pretext for further US military action
in the Middle East?

In the world’s major intelligence agencies—the Russian FSB, the
British MI-5, the Israeli Mossad, the French SGDN, China’s Second
Intelligence Department—these are the questions that are being asked,
along with a further question: Is the Obama administration in control
of its own national security apparatus? These agencies undoubtedly
dismiss the official US account of the abortive Christmas Day bombing
for what it is: disinformation generated to delude American public
opinion.

We do not claim to have the answers to all these questions. But they
are the starting point of any serious investigation. If they are ruled
out in advance, as is the case now in the American media, the result
must inevitably be a whitewash, as with the myriad official
“investigations” into the 9/11 attacks.

Typical in this respect is the editorial published Saturday in the New
York Times, under the headline, “Why Didn’t They See It?” The
editorial swallows whole the claim of a failure on the part of the
intelligence and homeland security bureaucracy to put together the
information about Abdulmutallab.

“No doubt sorting through heaps of information and determining what is
urgent or even worthy of follow-up is daunting,” the Times commented.
“Still, it is incredible, and frightening, that the government cannot
do at least as good a job at swiftly updating and correlating
information as Google.”

Actually, it is literally “incredible,” i.e., not credible. And it is
doubtful that even the editors of the Times believe it, although they
are constrained from saying so by the informal but virtually complete
self-censorship of the American capitalist media.

In a series of appearances on the Sunday morning network television
programs, Obama’s chief White House counterterrorism adviser, former
top CIA official John Brennan, declared that the US government’s
data-handling methods were at least as good as those of Google and
Amazon.com. This only begs the question again: who made the decisions
that allowed Abdulmutallab to board the Northwest jet?

Additional facts reported in the media this weekend make this decision
still less susceptible to innocent explanation.

The Washington Post cited a “family cousin” quoting this warning from
Abdulmuttalab’s father to the US government: “Look at the texts he’s
sending. He’s a security threat.”

Given the vast powers of the US National Security Agency to pore
through the world’s email traffic—amplified by the USA Patriot
Act—there is little doubt that such a tip would have led quickly to
the surveillance of all electronic communications by, with or about
the young Nigerian.

There have also been reports that the father supplied US
representatives with the number of his son’s Nigerian passport, which
was communicated to the National Counterterrorism Center. However,
neither the State Department nor the NCTC checked whether the younger
Abdulmutallab had a valid US visa—a fact readily determined from
internal US government databases—or made any effort to rescind it.

Time magazine, citing a “source close to the family” of the bomber,
wrote that “it was an alleged threat to blow up an American plane that
apparently alarmed his parents and supposedly resulted in his father
going to warn the US embassy.” This suggests that US officials had
warning a month ahead of time about the specific target of attack.

Newsweek magazine reported that the Saudi counterterrorism chief,
Muhammad bin Nayaf, gave a briefing to Brennan in the White House
sometime last fall about the specific technique used by the Northwest
bomber, concealing PETN explosive in his undergarments, which was used
in a failed Al Qaeda attempt to assassinate bin Nayaf himself.

Moreover, according to Newsweek, the NSA had intercepted telephone
communications between Abdulmutallab and Mohammed al-Awlaki, the
radical US-born Islamic cleric, now living in Yemen, who had been in
communication with Major Nidal Malik Hasan in the months before his
assault on military personnel at Ft. Hood, Texas, which took 13 lives.
Al-Awlaki issued a statement in November predicting a Christmas
“surprise” that would make Yemen a key arena of struggle against the
United States.

As in the case of the 9/11 attacks, no confidence can be placed in any
agency of the US government or in the American media to provide an
honest or probing account of what has taken place. This fact testifies
to the continued erosion of democratic rights in the United States,
and the enormous danger this represents to the American people and the
people of the world.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/bomb-j04.shtml

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