The bungled attempt by the young Nigerian
to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day has raised a lot of eyebrows in and out of government. Within days The New York Times was reporting that Abdulmutallab had been trained in Yemen by the one-time Guantanamo detainee Ali al-Shihri, that his wealthy father, the Nigerian businessman Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had “urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cell phone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical,” and that the CIA “in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab – including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen – but did not share the information with the other security agencies,” most significantly the National Counterterrorism Center. The Center already had Abdulmutallab on a 550,000-person list of individuals with “possible ties to terrorism” but declined to include him on “more refined watch lists” or the worldwide no-fly list vital for airport security.
While most of America was still reeling from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Carnival Corporation – the world’s largest cruise line company – reported a better-than-expected third quarter profit last year of $1.3 billion.
Last month I appeared on Fox News Network’s morning show, Fox and Friends, to talk about airline security. Normally such appearances end up as clips on the Fox News Web site. Granted, the Steve Doocy interview was hardly groundbreaking, but that is seldom a criterion for feeding the beast that is a major cable network news Web site. Curiously, I was quoted in a written piece on the site that got a fair amount of pick-up, but no video.
Despite their reliance on natural resources to sell cruises, the cruise line industry defends its right to treat the oceans like a sewer and a waste dump.
Had President Obama been aware of what the CIA did to the government of New Zealand in 2006 he might have been even more angry at his national security team. John Brennan, his counterterrorism advisor, conducted an investigation that failed to connect some old CIA dots that would have gone a long way in explaining why the CIA does not like to share information, even with the President of the United States.








