Security Lapis, or Obama Blue
The incident on Christmas aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 is a milestone in the global wars on terror, a milestone - a route marker - in the sense that we are still on that road after so many years. The shooting at Ft. Hood notwithstanding. At first it was hard to know what to make of it. Initial press reports the day of the incident were vague and sketchy for several hours with repeated references to fireworks or firecrackers. The real second guessing
U.S. spy chief in spotlight after botched plane attack - Yahoo! News started a few days later, or about the time Janet Nepolitano made an ill-advised gambit to reassure people Is Janet Napolitano to blame for Flight 253 security failure? / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com. What I first heard on the news made it seem within in the realm of questionable bad passenger behavior - that some one had set off a Christmas Kracker on the plane. Beyond misdemeanor, but less than a national security threat. Later reports made more specific reference to Fireworks or a sparkler like device. Criminal behavior and demonstrative of a security breach. Only after about twenty-four hours did reports establish it was an explosive device: indicative of murderous intent. A security breach and threat. Even then it was nearly forty-eight hours before I saw a news story that named the explosive and indicated that there was enough of it to blow a hole in the plane. Its still unclear whether the aircraft was at compressed or decompressed-air altitude when the incident occurred. Each of these indicates a different level of problem
Obama Reviewing Initial Reports on Christmas Day Air Incident - Yahoo! News. While I recognize that my initial desire to see this be less than it seemed was wishful thinking. I also see, in those leaping to the worst conclusions, wish fulfillment thinking
Democrats' worst nightmare: Terrorism on their watch - Ben Smith and Carol E. Lee - POLITICO.com:. In the days that followed Ruth Marcus' Op-Ed. in the Washington Post struck me as representative of problematic thinking on the incident
Ruth Marcus - Eight years after 9/11, another cascade of security failures - washingtonpost.com. While writing that - "Hindsight needs no Lasik" - her piece trades as much on the false clarity yesterday holds today. She mocks what she sees as the Administration's initial "Every-things fine reaction" stating that with terrorist attack it's not if but when. That we live now with a new layer of risk... a new reality. Terrorism is not new, it is more that what used to appear to happen elsewhere or to other people, may now happen here. A stateless Islamic nationalism is geographically indistinct. She questions why the recommendations of the 9-11 commission have not answered for this problem. Why information was not shared not pooled across divides of foreign and domestic agencies, why problematic people on various lists: watch lists, did not automatically sort out to no-fly lists. Why was there not more effective on-the-spot screening with the latest technologies. Given that they laid it all out, she questions why quotes (like hers) from the 9-11 report are not being used in media analysis of "the Christmas Attack"?. She offers a couple of incredulous how-can-it-be's: that his multi-entry visa was not revoked after his father went to British and US authorities. His British visa was revoked, but apparently for requesting it to attend a nonexistent college. How can it be, she asks that an individual passenger traveling from Nigeria with its "known security lapses", not checking luggage, and purchasing a ticket with cash not raise flags. She responds with sour sarcasm suggesting he should have added at this point: "you might want to check my underwear." These points seem and may be damming, particularly the last, but it is difficult to say without knowing how prevalent, how possibly common such travel arrangements are, particularly among the very wealthy Key dates surrounding the Christmas Day attack - Yahoo! News. How can it be in the face of all this that the administration's strategy was to (re-)assure us that they were looking into things another move to sarcasm she seems to believe Neapolitan was looking upon us as children and telling us to "settle down". What were they going to do advise people to panic and abandon air travel during the holiday travel season? The government has a duty here, but that is not it. Some of the sense of obviousness in what to do is likely lessened by Air line corporations reminding the TSA daily that they are trying to run businesses, ordinary passengers directing hourly ire at TSA employees for inconveniences, the even more caustic effects of trying to apply security protocols to the rich and entitled. You tell one former prime minister, or A-list VIP they can't board a flight and you might as well have Monster.com up on your monitor already. Full body scanners where not deployed widely, because the public did not want them and few political official were willing to make a fight out of it
Editorial - Why Didn't They See It? - NYTimes.com. She and most others (OK, just about everyone) feel President Obama "got it right" on Tuesday [29Dec09] with his acknowledgment of systemic failure
Obama Faults 'Systemic Failure' in U.S. Security - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com. She does point out, correctly I think that determined terrorists eventually may succeed in an attack, but we should not accept in this present case an amateur actor and no especial effort made to reduce warning flags or obscure his activities might have brought a plane down. Further that this incidents fortunate outcome was dependent entirely on reactions of the passengers, not the formal system.
Given that a terrorist act nearly succeeded. Did someone not follow Standard Operating Procedures as laid out? Did the Standard Operating Procedure not contain a countermeasure to this contingency, this method of attack? Did the intelligence/information that was the sufficient condition for action, not exist within the security system
Spy Agencies Failed to Collate Clues on Terror - NYTimes.com, or any adjunct information system?
A corollary to operating procedures and systems design; was the system processing information fast enough? In terms of having enough man or computing power to examine the data, the ability and capacity to move, share, transfer information to other inter (intra) agency or international analysis or action points. The overall structure of US intelligence organization is unwieldy. I imagine you insulate yourself from the fact that you can't control the structure of foreign agencies or even the structure of domestic agencies by building multiple level literalism into the endeavor. This goes against human nature to a degree, Macys never told Gimbals, Nyt doesn't tell Wapo, Barton doesn't tell Gellman. Any information passed from one point to another whether a particle or a database will generate a moment of examination, a reflexive twitch of concern, that alone will critically slow a system down. All the same I believe a system a continually evolving system can be developed that reduces chance of a massive terror attack to a significantly low percentage, with people just doing an earnest professional job. This because there are still a fair amount of moving parts to a large scale terror attack outside of native Islamic lands, and that makes Al Qaeda's work difficult too.
If we regard this as war as many suggest: "How long a Long War" are we prepared to fight is a question that must be answered. As long as it takes, it should be understood is the same as no answer at all. And contains no truth.
An unbounded state of war against non-nationals actors, is not reducible to any model of a war against a nation. It does answer for a psychological desire for opposition. We need to weigh the costs of continuing an indefinite "state of war" against criminalization of transnational terrorism. Recognizing the roots of terror as violent murder perpetrated by individuals existing as civilians as they plan and move to commit these acts, and the ability of police processes to identify, isolate and arrest criminal behavior. From that point a hybrid of jurisprudence and prisoner of war incarceration needs to be developed. There will be some who will take their metaphoric uniform off, and repatriate after they have answered for any breach of peace. There will be those who won't, but only some degree of evidence, some degree of due process can tell us which. A last point, security versus commerce as a nations core, or guiding principle. There is a notion of America I've known all my life - as the beacon of the free market, of sellers and manufacturers to the world, or at least bankers and traders. The New York Times dropped this article in over the holidays, part of a larger series on China, concerning the Chinese purchase stake in an Afghani copper mine
Uneasy Engagement - China, Willing to Spend, Wins a Trove of Afghan Copper - Series - NYTimes.com. Even as our fortune as a nation is being spent down absorbed unilaterally in international security matters we insist on internalizing. The great commerce demi-urge of the new century emerges elsewhere.
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