The Nigerian Weiner Bomber - Commenteray by Jim Dean, Heritage TV

Jim Dean, Heritage TV producer/host

Jim Dean is the producer of Heritage TV and a member of Georgia Heritage Council and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

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The Nigerian Weiner Bomber
-- Commentary by Jim Dean 1/04/2010

Dear Folks,

The sad state of our government has been on display during the aftermath of this new bombing attempt. It's pin the tail on the donkey time for the weiner bomber. The Intel folks will find a scapegoat. Obama assured that when he said there was a 'systemic failure.' That is code for 'bring me a head.' And it's not only the administration acting pitifully (as in against profiling). The Repubs are making all the political hay that they can, trying to rebound from Obama's 'tougher image' surge after putting more troops into Afghanistan.

The press jumped to conclusions way too early as they often do...presenting that they knew what went wrong before even the internal review had even cranked up. Their immediate focus was made about the dad's CIA report. But that report was about as unspecific as it could be. Dad did not really know much. Can you imagine the number of American parents who could hand in a report like that on one of their kids? At least they would know what the gang name was.

Vague reports like this come in by the hundreds everyday. Fify thousand kids disappear every year here and until cable and Nancy Grace discovered how to make a living from it these kids were page-10 news if they were lucky. Most police would not even start looking for kids over 13 for at least 24 hours.

Obama Slams Security Breach - Wall Street Journal, 12/31/09
Some Backing for Napolitano in Wake of Remarks - NY Times, 1/3/10
Plot exposes fissure in U.S. intelligence community - Reuters, 12/31/09
Google News

It is difficult for the general public to understand that there is not a conveyor belt that brings in hundreds of new investigators everyday to jump on these new potential terrorist threats. Everything has to be prioritized. Sure, the flow charts have all these lines and boxes drawn on them but at the end of the day it gets down to how many people do you have following up. And are these people already behind on other things already? All this Intel coordination/sharing stuff is a never ending work in progress.

The next media negligence smoking gun was the British visa cancellation. That turned out to be simply for lying about listing a bogus school on his resume, something done all the time by folks trying to get a little umpf into a school visa approval. It was purely an immigration issue. On a daily basis there are probably hundreds if not thousands of blips like this popping up. If all these blips were being sent in our Intel folks they would simply be swamped.

It was interesting to see they gave the numbers on the 'warm' threat list...about 500,000. But those names sit there until someone in the field sends in more info. That is often when they get picked up on something. In this case more information did come in, like the Yemen report about 'a Nigerian being prepared', which was the next big clue for sure. But the public does not see how many hundreds, or even thousands of similar situations are our folks already trying to track. So we are back to how much manpower is really needed to keep track on this vast army of potential threats.

There is limited budgeting for the huge numbers of people to work the warm list. The money and people talent is saved for when they go up one more level...like a report they have gone to Pakistan and disappeared into the frontier. A phone call back phone can trigger that...or a foreign intel agency report. If folks want to fix this, I can do it in a jiffy...kind of...and put a dent in the unemployment rate. You just hire and train 100,000 of the unemployed to work the warm list.

The discussion about funding allocation competition between technology equipment and personnel is another very complicated subject. The better use of technology tends to keep the people budget down, but at a risk, which Rumsfeld's plan 'do Iraq on the cheap' proved. At the end of the day, regardless of the technology, a human has to deal with it...and that is where another set of variables come in. That starts with what does he or she already have on their desk, what have they already been ordered to report back on by Friday, etc.

One soldier going to Afghanistan costs the American taxpayer one million dollars a year. What most folks never stop to consider is where else could a million dollars be spent to protect America better. It could pay for ten $100K warm list investigators, or twenty $50K ones (plus benefits, of course).

"The one security precaution the government refused to consider was to require extra screening for passengers who looked like the last three-dozen terrorists to attack airplanes. Since Muslims took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, every attack on a commercial airliner has been committed by foreign-born Muslim men with the same hair color, eye color and skin color. Half of them have been named Mohammed.....The only advantage we have in a war with stateless terrorists was ruled out of order ab initio by political correctness." --Ann Coulter, from Napolitano Declares 'The System Worked', 12/31/09

The press was initially hesitant to discuss 'profiling', and we know why. They are generally against it. Only over the last few days of the bomber coverage have you seen the Israelis discussing their airline security. The best one liner was 'you have to put 90% of your resources onto the 10% you deem most threatening.' Despite this being brain-dead obvious we have an internal security risk lobby that refuses to even consider real profiling. I can assure you the Jihadis are most grateful and would love to send them Thank you plaques but I hear mail servies are a bit difficult where they are.

Those who can't wait to hang some mid-level Intel guy for the weiner bomber would themselves take no responsibility for the 'no profiling lobby' threat that consequently hangs over all airline travelers. Institutionalized profiling could have nipped the weiner bomber where it hurts. You simply have more people to focus on a smaller group so people like this don't slip through. They have never slipped by the Israelis. Do you think that is because the Jihadis don't want to hit them? There are no holes in the El Al security system. They have their priorities straight.

"National defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman." --John Adams
"Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young jihadist from Nigeria by way of Yemen, was quickly indicted on federal charges of trying to destroy an aircraft, which means that he will have the full array of rights accorded to every defendant in an American court. Someone will have to read his Miranda rights, and he will have the right to a lawyer. This will please the civil rights radicals who imagine the Constitution to be a suicide pact, and who don't, or can't, understand that the most important civil right of all is the right not to be murdered." --Wesley Pruden

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, passport photo
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's Nigerian Underwear

The terrorists will always find the holes. But why maintain holes for them? They knew they had a shot at slipping the weiner bomber through the no-profiling crack in our door. That bomb material could not be picked up. They knew we were sensitive about touching certain places and of charges of, heaven forbid, 'racial profiling.'

But that is bogus. Why? Simply because third world people who have a lot less information available on them are riskier not because they are third-worlders or of a certain race, but because we just don't know much about them. We already have an airport security fast lane for frequent flyers willing to give all their necessary info to get them onto the definitely-not-a-problem list.

A guy with no passport...what difference does it make what the race or religion is? You just put them all through tighter security. Now many of these people may be non white. But that is not a slam dunk that the policy is racist as you have another solid justification for it. The cost of doing equal screening on everybody has put us at risk. The anti-profiliing security cops trot out the usual examples, the perennial white supremacist and few NeoNazi threats they have caught.

But that is bogus and here is why. Those groups are very small. They operate in the open so they are easily identifable and easy to infiltrate. Keeping a handle on them does NOT eat up a lot of resources. That is what the other 10% of our resources are for. On the other hand, the Radical Islam threat is astronomically bigger due to having none of the above working to your advantage. Besides, they are the ones who have actually carried out bomb attacks on planes. Without profiling, the bombers are going to keep coming, especially so if we continue to show them where the openings are...places we don't look...don't touch. And the full body scanner are not a panacea either.

For example the vagina bomber is coming. It's just a matter of time. Even pat downs will not find that. Initial reports on the Nigerian assumed that we had a 'leg bomber' here. But the attackers were way ahead of the pat down game. They formed the explosives into a penis shape to defeat a light pat down. Media has played down this 'shape' aspect of how the explosives were sewn in.

And the 'booby bomber' is in the planning stages, too. Some of the pat down tv images have shown the female inspectors pushing down between the blouse area between a woman's breasts, an obvious place to hide something. But of course they don't squeeze the breasts. So do any of you think the terrorists are not going to eventually use a Muslim woman plastic surgery boob job bomber with 200 grams of explosives in each side? Would they be morally opposed to doing that?

If they can just figure a way to detonate them they will be on their way here. They know that close physical inspection of muslim women would cause a massive uproar and be a win win situation for them. When these women go to the hospital they have to remain completely clothed during examinations and the doctor is not allowed to touch them. The male family members are there to make sure. So what is the answer....planes for Muslims only...where there is no profiling?

We have been trading off security for political correctness and the country has suffered terribly. The Hispanic gangs are just one horrible example. They have killed more people than Al Queda. Better technology has been the smokescreen for security people shortage. Folks can be made to feel more comfortable with the magic box. But as we continue to learn, partial solutions are just that. You are accepting losses as a cost of doing business, like we do with our illegal immigration policy.

Confederate General Bedford Forrest is famous for his line, 'Hit 'em where they ain't'. The Jihadi terrorists have probably never read much on Forrest, but they have figured it out anyway.

So the only question remaining is whether we will figure it out. And that is...air travel will always be a dangerous mode of travel as long as we leave security holes open. So to all those trying to win some ideological or political advantage from the weiner bomber by finding someone on whom to pin the donkey-tail, they can start right in their own ranks as there is no shortage of jackasses available.

Jim Dean is the producer of Heritage TV and a member of the Georgia Heritage Council.