After spending billions (if not trillions) of dollars on homeland security gadgets and employees, it seems the federal government still does not have the capacity to merge basic information or even spell correctly. I'm quite sure these new protocols and additional dollars will not fix the problems.
Fixing errors after the Christmas Day near-bombing
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 12, 2010; A15
Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary of state for public affairs, acknowledged last week at a news conference that State Department officials made two key errors in the initial reporting about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
They misspelled his name -- "a one-letter difference," an intelligence official said -- in filing their first report Nov. 20, the day after Umau Mutallab, a Nigerian banker, described his concerns about his son.
And they didn't officially look for Abdulmutallab in a department database of U.S. visa-holders.
State Department officials wrote a Visa Viper cable Nov. 20 saying that Mutallab thought his son had become attached to "extremists" and might be in Yemen, and that the father wanted help in trying to locate him to reestablish family relations. The Visa Viper terrorist-reporting program calls for each Foreign Affairs post abroad to identify "potential terrorists and to develop information on those individuals," according to the State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual.
But before the Christmas Day bombing attempt aboard a Detroit-bound airliner, developing such information for a Visa Viper report apparently did not involve searching for the name of a "potential terrorist" in the State Department's database of people with visas to enter the United States. It is now.
That was the first reform announced almost immediately by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and later by President Obama.
Back in November, it was a day or two after the initial Visa Viper report was received at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) before analysts there realized the correct spelling of Abdulmutallab's name, based on data from other agencies. With the error corrected, he was listed, along with about 400,000 others, on the Terrorist Identities Datamark Environment (TIDE). That is a list of people, along with relevant information about them, who are suspected of, or known to be associated with, terrorist activities outside the United States.
At that time, NCTC analysts who worked on TIDE entries processed only nominations from the State Department, the CIA and other collection agencies. They checked the TIDE list to see if a name was on it, but they did not search other databases for more information. The NCTC also determined what further action, if any, was necessary, such as moving a person's name to the next level, the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center.
Meanwhile, back at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, State Department officials -- "out of curiosity" -- did check to see whether Abdulmutallab had a visa for entry into the United States, according to a department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is under investigation. But because the misspelled name was used, the fact that Abdulmutallab had a multi-entrance, two-year tourist visa obtained in June 2008 was not sent to the NCTC or to other intelligence agencies.
As Crowley put it last week, "The initial search to determine if there was a visa did not -- one did not show, expressly because of this misspelling."
"This is a critical lesson learned," Crowley said. "The steps that we've put in the process beginning immediately after December 25 will, in fact, make sure that future reports do have visa information in them, so that this is . . . inserted into the process right from the outset."
Lack of information about Abdulmutallab's open visa affected the NCTC's determination of the threat he presented and thus the list he was put on. Apparently no other agency checked State's database of visa-holders, though they all have access to it. The assumption, one intelligence official said, was that State would have done that.
One of the major findings of the ongoing inquiry into Abdulmutallab's case deals with reviewing the names of those with outstanding visas to enter the United States. The State Department has withdrawn an unknown number of visas since Dec. 25, but Crowley refused to discuss any except Abdulmutallab's.
One of Obama's new directives requires the FBI to "conduct a thorough review of Terrorist Screening Database holdings" -- about 440,000 names -- "and ascertain current visa status of all 'known and suspected terrorists,' beginning with the no fly list" -- 4,000 names. One wonders if such a check has been done before.
And the NCTC, under the president's new directive, has been given responsibility to do more than just bring together data collected by others. It is to "establish a dedicated capability responsible for enhancing record information on possible terrorists" on the TIDE list.
In addition, it is to pursue "thoroughly and exhaustively terrorism threat threads" with a new group so it can pass on information for "followup action by the intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security communities." For that, according to NCTC officials, they will need more personnel and equipment.
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