HONOLULU – President Barack Obama said Tuesday "a systemic failure" allowed the attempted Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound flight from Amsterdam. He called it "totally unacceptable." The president said he wants preliminary results by Thursday from two investigations he has ordered to examine the many lapses that occurred.

"There was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security," Obama said.

It will take weeks for a more comprehensive investigation into what allowed a 23-year-old Nigerian carrying explosives onto the flight despite the fact the suspect had possible ties to al-Qaida, Obama said.

"It's essential that we diagnose the problems quickly," the president said, interrupting his vacation for a second consecutive day to address the incident, with more anger this time directed at the flaws in the U.S. system.

The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was on one advisory list, but never made it onto more restrictive lists that would have caught the attention of U.S. counterterrorist screeners, despite his father's warnings to U.S. Embassy officials in Nigeria last month. Those warnings also did not result in Abdulmutallab's U.S. visa being revoked.

On top of that, airport security equipment did not detect the bomb-making devices and materials he allegedly carried on board the Northwest Airlines flight carrying nearly 300 people.

Obama said many things went right after the incident, with passengers and the flight crew subduing the man and government officials working quickly to increase security. He singled out his homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, backing her much-criticized comments that the attempted terror attack showed the aviation security system worked.

"As Secretary Napolitano has said, once the suspect attempted to take down Flight 253, after his attempt, it's clear that passengers and crew, our homeland security systems, and our aviation security took all appropriate actions," Obama said.

Napolitano received so much criticism for her Sunday talk show remarks that she did another round of interviews the following day to say the system did not work in preventing Abdulmutallab from getting on the plane with a bomb. But, she said, the response system did work after the man was subdued. She contends her remarks were taken out of context.

Republicans are questioning her judgment and a few have called for her resignation. The White House says her job is safe.

However, Obama said: "What's also clear is this: When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been ... a systemic failure has occurred. And I consider that totally unacceptable."

The two reviews, which Obama said got under way on Sunday, are looking at airport security procedures and the U.S. system of terror watchlists.

"It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect's name on a no-fly list," Obama said. "Even without this one report, there were bits of information available within the intelligence community that could have and should have been pieced together."

Had that happened, he said, "the warning signs would have triggered red flags, and the suspect would have never been allowed to board that plane for America."

AP, 29 December 2009

There is clearly a concerted effort by the Government to claim loudly that the threat posed by radicalized American Muslims is increasing. Last week, The Los Angeles Times published a lengthy, scary story under the headline "U.S. sees homegrown Muslim extremism as rising threat," claiming that "Anti-terrorism officials and experts see signs of accelerated radicalization among American Muslims." Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned this month: "Home-based terrorism is here." When justifying his Afghanistan escalation at West Point, Obama warned of "extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror." And strangely, on Saturday, two articles with virtually identical storylines appeared -- one in The Washington Post and the other in The New York Times -- warning that American Muslims, for the first time, are now becoming a radicalized threat in the way European Muslims are.

At least from all appearances, these claims are being made exclusively on the basis of a handful of recent episodes involving American Muslims accused of having links to Al Qaeda and/or the Taliban. There is no data whatsoever offered to corroborate the claim of a "trend." Given the obvious dangers inherent in trumpeting threats from internal sources -- as well as the motives the Government generally has in disseminating such warnings and the motive it specifically has when escalating a war -- far more than a few anecdotes ought to be required before any of this is believed.

What's most striking about these "warnings" is that they virtually never examine the reasons why this would be happening. Why, after all this time, would American Muslims suddenly be more willing to engage in violence against the U.S.? To his credit, Scott Shane devoted several paragraphs of his NYT article to addressing this question, and what he finds is both highly significant and highly unsurprising:

[T]he continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American operations like drone strikes in Pakistan, are fueling radicalization at home, [terrorism expert Robert Leiken] said. "Just the length of U.S. involvement in these countries is provoking more Muslim Americans to react," Mr. Leiken said . . . .
Like many other specialists, [Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce] Hoffman pointed to the United States' combat in Muslim lands as the only obvious spur to many of the recent cases, especially those with a Pakistani connection. "The longer we’ve been in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said, "the more some susceptible young men are coming to believe that it’s their duty to take up arms to defend their fellow Muslims."
A few analysts, in fact, argue that Mr. Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan -- intended to prevent a terrorist haven there -- could backfire.

Robert A. Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist, contends that suicide attacks are almost always prompted by resentment of foreign troops, and that escalation in Afghanistan will fuel more plots. "This new deployment increases the risk of the next 9/11,” he said. “It will not make this country safer."

The evidence proving this causation is now so overwhelming as to be undeniable.  Waging wars, occupying, and dropping bombs in Muslim countries is the single most counter-productive step that can be taken to combat Islamic extremism (indefinitely imprisoning them without charges is a close second).  It's akin to advising a lung cancer patient to triple the quantity of cigarettes he smokes each day.  Yet we continue to do it over and over, and then point to the harms we cause as reasons we need to continue doing it.  Our "counter-terrorism" campaign basically consists of three steps repeated endlessly:

(1) Interfere in or otherwise act aggressively in the Muslim world.
(2) Provoke increased anti-American sentiment and fuel terrorism as a result of Step 1.
(3) Point to the increased anti-American sentiment and terrorism as a reason we need to escalate our interference and aggression in the Muslim world.  Return to Step 1.

The coordinated campaign to hype the alleged "growing domestic Muslim threat" at exactly the time we are escalating our conventional war in Afghanistan and our covert Predator war in Pakistan is a perfect illustration of this process.   Basically, what Shane's article reveals is the shocking truth that waging war and otherwise interfering in Muslim countries for more a full decade radicalizes Muslims and drives some of them to want to return the violence.  Who would have guessed?

By Glenn Greenwald
Salon, 14 December 2009

WASHINGTON – A draft memo leaked to a conservative Web site is an encouraging sign the government intends to transfer Guantanamo terrorist suspects to Illinois, Sen. Richard Durbin and the state's governor said Friday.

In a joint statement, Durbin, D-Ill., and Gov. Pat Quinn said the memo signals "the administration has narrowed its focus" to a nearly empty maximum-security state prison in Thomson, a sleepy town of 450 people near the Mississippi River about 150 miles west of Chicago.

"Even though the final decision has not been made, we are encouraged by this development," Durbin and Quinn said. "We will continue working with the White House, the Defense Department and the Justice Department to address important questions regarding security and job creation, and finalize this agreement."

This week, five Pakistani men from Northen Virginia were arrested by authorities in Pakistan, where they are being questioned on suspicion of having links to radical Islamic terrorists.

These events both propel and confirm the larger worry that global terror syndicates continue to have a reach that extends to the United States, concerns that were raised by President Obama in his West Point address last week. But there's an interesting element to the story that I thought might go under-reported -- and just a few minutes ago on MSNBC, correspondent Pete Williams went on teevee and under-reported it: