Qaeda-Linked Group Claims It Was Behind Bomb Attempt
Source: Ny times
HONOLULU — President Obama emerged from Hawaiian seclusion on Monday to try to quell gathering criticism of his administration’s handling of the thwarted Christmas Day bombing of an American airliner as a branch of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attempted attack.
“We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable,” Mr. Obama told reporters during a break in his 10-day holiday vacation. “This was a serious reminder of the dangers that we face and the nature of those who threaten our homeland.”Skip to next paragraph
U.S. Marshals Service, via European Pressphoto AgencyAn undated handout photo of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the thwarted bombing, was made available by the U.S. Marshals Service.
He added that he had ordered reviews of the air navigation screening system and the terrorist watch list system. “The American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season,” he said.
The president spoke after the Saudi arm of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attempted attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks militant Islamist Web sites.
In a statement issued on jihadist forums, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula boasts the success of the “Nigerian brother” in breaking through security barriers and of its own explosives technology, SITE reported, blaming a technical fault for the low-power detonation. The group has mounted attacks within Yemen and Saudi Arabia and in 2004, captured and beheaded a 49-year-old American engineer working in Riyadh, Paul M. Johnson Jr.
Mr. Obama’s remarks to reporters were the first public comments he has made since arriving here Thursday and the first since a Nigerian man tried to set off explosives aboard a flight approaching Detroit on Friday. Questions about how the man slipped through the security system have been compounded by the Obama administration’s assertion over the weekend that “the system worked,” a judgment it reversed Monday.
Just hours before the president’s appearance, his secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, appeared on NBC’s “Today” show to recalibrate the assessment she and another top official offered on Sunday. Ms. Napolitano said her remark had been taken out of context and that the thwarted bombing in fact represented a failure of the nation’s aviation security system.
“Our system did not work in this instance,” she said. “No one is happy or satisfied with that. An extensive review is under way.”
Until now, Mr. Obama had tried to strike a balance between signaling that he is on top of the situation and not drawing more attention to it than it already was generating. Each day since Friday, his staff accompanying him here in his home state put out statements indicating that the president was holding conference calls and requesting action of government agencies. But he declined for three days to address it in public himself, cognizant perhaps of warnings by some terrorism experts against elevating such incidents and by extension their authors.
Yet the visual contrasts have been jarring. Pictures of passengers enduring tougher security screening at the airport were juxtaposed against images of the president soaking in the sun and surf of this tropical getaway. Appearing at a Marine base near the Kailua beachfront house he has rented, Mr. Obama on Monday praised the “quick and heroic actions of passengers and crew” but made no attempt to defend the security system that allowed the suspect onto the plane with jerry-rigged explosives in the first place.
Beyond the reviews, he pledged unspecified action against any groups that were involved. “We will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us, whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere they are plotting attacks against the U.S. homeland,” Mr. Obama said.
He urged Americans to “remain vigilant but also be confident,” saying that threats against the United States should not be allowed to undermine “the open society and the values that we cherish as Americans.”
The family of the suspect, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said Monday that they had been trying to locate him for weeks and had sought help from Nigerian and American officials. They said they would cooperate with an investigation.
His father, a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official, phoned the American Embassy in Abuja in October with a warning that his son had developed radical views, had disappeared and might have traveled to Yemen, American officials said, but the young man’s visa to enter the United States, which was good until June 2010, was not revoked.
Instead, the officials said Sunday, embassy officials marked his file for a full investigation should he reapply for a visa. And when the information was passed on to Washington, his name was added to 550,000 others with possible terrorist connections — but not to the no-fly list. That meant no flags were raised when he used cash to buy a ticket to the United States and boarded a plane, checking no bags.
A jittery air travel system coped with a new scare on Sunday. On the same flight that Mr. Abdulmutallab took Friday — Northwest 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit — an ailing Nigerian man who spent a long time in the restroom inadvertently set off a security alert. It turned out to be a false alarm.
Officials in several countries, meanwhile, worked to retrace Mr. Abdulmutallab’s path and to look for security holes. In Nigeria, officials said he arrived in Lagos on Thursday, Christmas Eve, just hours before departing for Amsterdam. American officials were tracking his travels to Yemen, and Scotland Yard investigators were checking on his connections in London, where he studied mechanical engineering from 2005 to 2008 at University College London and was president of the Islamic Society.
Ms. Napolitano was not the only Obama administration official to initially portray the episode, in which passengers and flight attendants subdued Mr. Abdulmutallab and doused the fire he had started, as a test that the air safety system passed.
Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, echoed the positive comments Ms. Napolitano made on ABC’s “This Week, ” saying in an interview on “Face the Nation” on CBS that “in many ways, this system has worked.”
But counterterrorism experts and members of Congress were hardly willing to praise what they said was a security system that had proved to be not nimble enough to respond to the ever-creative techniques devised by would-be terrorists.
Congressional leaders said the tip from Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, should have resulted in closer scrutiny of the suspect before he boarded the plane in Amsterdam. Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking minority member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said his visa should have been revoked or at least he should have been given a physical pat-down or a full-body scan.
“This individual should not have been missed,” Ms. Collins said in an interview on Sunday. “Clearly, there should have been a red flag next to his name.”
The episode has rejuvenated a debate that began after the 2001 attacks over the proper balance between security and privacy. The government has spent the last several years cutting the size of the watch list, after repeated criticism that too many people were being questioned at border crossings or checkpoints. Now it may be asked to expand it again.
“You are second-guessed one day and criticized on another,” said one Transportation Security Administration official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
Privacy advocates, for example, have tried to stop or at least slow the introduction of advanced checkpoint screening devices that use so-called millimeter waves to create an image of a passenger’s body, so officers can see under clothing to determine if a weapon or explosive has been hidden. Security officers, in a private area, review the images, which are not stored. Legislation is pending in the House that would prohibit the use of this equipment for routine passenger screening.
To date, only 40 of these machines have been installed at 19 airports across the United States — meaning only a tiny fraction of passengers pass through them. Amsterdam’s airport has 15 of these machines — more than just about any airport in the world — but an official there said Sunday that they were prohibited from using them on passengers bound for the United States, for a reason she did not explain.
Michael Chertoff, former secretary of homeland security, and Kip Hawley, who ran the Transportation Security Administration until January, said the new body-scanning machines were a critical tool that should quickly be installed in more airports around the country.
So far, an additional 150 full-body imaging machines have been ordered, but nationwide there are approximately 2,200 checkpoint screening lanes.
For now, American aviation officials have mandated that airports across the world pat down passengers on flights headed to the United States, a practice that in the past has also raised privacy objections.
“I understand people have issue with privacy,” Mr. Hawley said Sunday. “But that is a tradeoff, and what happened on the plane just highlights what the stakes are.”
One subject of the administration’s security review will be the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, the extensive collection of data on more than 500,000 people into which the warning from Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father’s was entered.
A law enforcement official said it was not unusual that a one-time comment from a relative would not place a person on the far smaller no-fly list, which has only 4,000 names, or the so-called selectee list of 14,000 names of people who are subjected to more thorough searches at checkpoints.
The point of the TIDE database, the official said, is to make sure even the most minor suspicious details are recorded so that they can be connected to new data in the future.
“The information goes in there, and it’s available to all the agencies,” the official said. “The point is to marry up data from different sources over time that may indicate an individual might be a terrorist.”
The debate over watch lists and screening will be shaped in part by the details emerging about Mr. Abdulmutallab, his radicalization, his own claims of training by a bomb expert in Yemen associated with Al Qaeda.
In the latest issue of Sada al-Malahim, the Internet magazine of the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, the group’s leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, urged his followers to use small bombs “in airports in the Western crusade countries that participated in the war against Muslims; or on their planes, or in their residential complexes or their subways.”
Mr. Abdulmutallab was transferred Sunday from a University of Michigan hospital to a federal prison in Milan, Mich.
His father, was scheduled to make a public statement on Monday after talking to Nigerian security officials in Abuja. A cousin, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to offend the family, said in an interview on Sunday that Mr. Abdulmutallab, while devout, had shown no signs of radicalism while growing up in Nigeria.
“We understand that he met some people who influenced him while in London,” the cousin said. “He left London and went to Yemen where, we suspect, he mixed up with the people that put him up to this whole business.”
He added: “I think his father is embarrassed by the whole thing, because that was not the way he brought the boy up. All of us are shocked by it.”
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