Anwar Al-Awlaki Assassination Would Be Erosion of Constitutional Rights

Anwar al-Awlaki (Wikipedia)

Today the New York Times has a story about pending litigation involving the targeted killing of an American citizen overseas in Yemen for ties to Al Qaeda. The Obama Administration wants to assassinate Anwar Al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric born in New Mexico in 1971 who became a radical when he moved to Yemen in 2004. His name entered the government's consciousness following the Fort Hood massacre after Al-Awlaki praised the shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, and was brought up again during interrogations of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the now testicle-less Christmas Day bomber of 2009, and Times Square bomber Faisel Shahzad. Adbulmutallab allegedly received training in Yemen from Al-Awlaki and Shahzad had allegedly been in contact with Al-Awlaki prior to his failed bombing attempt.

TSA Embarrasses Self Yet Again with Newark Security Breach

For all of the shortcomings of the terrorist watch lists and the inability to communicate interdepartmentally that led, via a confluence of incompetency, to the failed Christmas Day bombing by newly nut-less Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab there was one thing that you could say about it: he was not screened by the TSA. Given that his flight originated in Nigeria and transferred in Amsterdam before heading to Detroit, the TSA's fingerprints were not directly on this mishap (a little more on that later). It seemed that the TSA would avoid the majority of the scrutiny. Until yesterday.

Last night around 5:20 p.m. some mysterious character somehow managed to enter the "sterile" side of Terminal C from the public side by going through an exit lane at the security area. Details are sketchy, as no one seems to know who this mystery man is. Even more embarrassing, the TSA did not notice the breach, but had to be alerted by a bystander that someone had improperly entered the terminal. Screening was temporarily halted, then the terminal was cleared out and passengers on planes at the gate were forced to deplane and be re-screened. Naturally, disorganization ensued.

Flights were grounded for six hours after the incident, and Newark is just about done shaking off delays and cancellations due to the incident (flights in and out of Newark as of noon today were not experiencing delays according to the FAA). However, given the interconnectedness of the airline system both nationally and internationally, the incident caused some major problems for Continental, who is Newark Airport's largest tenant and uses the majority of Terminal C's gates.

Meanwhile, the TSA has identified the screener whose responsibility was manning the exit lane to make sure no one did exactly what this mystery individual did. The TSA declined to publicly name the screener or what disciplinary action would be taken. Anything less than termination, however, would be insulting.

Needless to say, this incident just throws an ever-increasing spotlight on the dysfunction of the TSA as a whole. Between embarrassing test failures, an insecure website which leaves passenger's personal information available to those who know how to get it, and publishing TSA screening guidelines online, the TSA has not really proven itself to be a competent agency worthy of the public's trust. Now this, a little over a week after an attempted bombing of an airliner in Detroit put the agency on high alert.

So where's the problem with the agency? To begin with, they lack leadership. The nominee to head the troubled agency, Erroll Southers, is stuck because Senator Jim DeMint (R- SC) is worried that Southers might allow the TSA members to unionize. I'm still waiting to hear from Senator DeMint's office for clarification of his stance on Southers' appointment.

Another issue with the TSA comes from the lackluster requirements to become a TSO (Transport Security Officer). All you need is the following: a GED or one year of work as either an X-ray tech, security work, or aviation screening. In other words, if you have dropped out of high school but have found work as a security guard or an X-ray tech, you are qualified to screen passengers, in the hopes of weeding out terrorists, boarding commercial airliners in the United States. These "requirements" set the bar lower than numerous municipal police departments, yet TSA officers are supposed to be able to detect tools of terrorism and prevent attacks onboard airliners?

On top of all of this, Chuck Schumer (of "the public option getting voted down is a victory for it" fame) stated only hours before the security breach at Newark that security at some airports abroad is "appallingly lax," while calling for a boycott by commercial airlines of those foreign airports not up to snuff. But Schumer's not the only clueless entity in this story. Less than a month before Abdulmutallab got explosives through Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria and tried to blow up a Delta airplane in Detroit, the TSA confirmed that the airport was in compliance with all 25 ICAO security procedures that were examined (though Representative Peter King (R-NY) stated that "Nigeria [has] inadequate security to begin with." An e-mail to his office asking if Rep. King had done anything about the TSA certification of Lagos' airport prior to the Christmas Day incident or plans to do anything about the TSA certification process has not yet been answered.). So it looks like our leaders are either misinformed/ignorant or, if they think they know something, don't do anything about it except to grandstand after the fact.

In summation, the TSA is a highly disorganized and woefully underqualified authority to be running something as important as airport and port security. They've proven it time and again and, if nothing is done to rectify the shortcomings of the organization, they'll prove it in the future. While our elected officials want to whine about overseas airport security, we really need to be looking at our own nation's security framework to see where we can improve. I said last post that a problem has been identified, now it's time to fix it. So will we just get lip service or will things actually be fixed?

Photos - TSA logo (TSA), Passengers stranded in Newark on Sunday night (ABC News)

Failed Christmas Day Bombing Prompts Criticism, Calls for Reform

Given the recent failed airline bombing by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Detroit on Christmas Day, a lot of folks have taken the opportunity to politicize this event and attack the Obama administration. Certainly criticism is due to the administration for this incident, but ad hominem attacks on Obama won't solve any problems. Let's get some pesky facts out of the way.

Representative Peter King (R-NY), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, believes that the Obama administration is not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough. He thinks that because Obama wants to try terrorists in criminal courts - as opposed to military tribunals - that he is putting our nation at risk. He thinks that Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano's framing the incident as a "criminal matter" and not an "act of terrorism" is worrying. Yet the response from the Obama administration is on par with that of the Bush administration's response to Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber" who tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes (hence why you have to go barefoot through security at airports now) on December 22, 2001. This, of course, does not faze King, who adds that Obama "seems almost awkward when he's talking about terrorism."

Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) would like the U.S. to send Abdulmutallab to Guantanamo and treat him as an enemy combatant. King seems to be in line with this thinking, requesting that Abdulmutallab be tried in a military tribunal rather than a criminal court. It's clear why they would want to do this, as the term "enemy combatant," which the Obama administration has stated will no longer be used, is a term that is outside the scope of the Geneva Conventions, which outlines the rights of prisoners of war. Add to this the fact that the term "enemy combatant" is based on skewed Supreme Court decisions (read the ABA's report on the treatment of enemy combatants, which contains a little ditty about Ex Parte Quirin), and you have a recipe for legal disaster.

But it's not just misguided politicians trying to gain political advantage via this failed terrorist act (Hoekstra, after all, invoked the incident in a recent fundraising letter). Take the New York Post. The paper took time off from covering all things Tiger Woods and had a front-page editorial slamming President Obama for not speaking out more forcefully and sooner about the attempted attack while mentioning in passing that he inherited the notoriously lackluster TSA (which is another matter, as the flight did not originate in the States), that it was actually George W. Bush who released two Yemenis from Gitmo suspected of leading the Al-Qaeda offshoot that allegedly sponsored Abdulmutallab, and that the intelligence databases created by the previous administration are of "unwieldy proportions." But other than that, Obama 100% dropped the ball.

Is the Obama administration guilty of mishandling the intelligence gathered on Abdulmutallab? Absolutely. It seems that a lack of communication between intelligence agencies or departments is to blame, and it is dismaying that over eight years after 9/11 this problem still has not been fixed. As far as Obama waiting a few days to speak, media outlets report that he received the information on Tuesday, the day he spoke out on it. I don't mind the president waiting a few days to verify the information (intelligence agencies were still trying to figure out if this was, in fact, sponsored by an Al-Qaeda offshoot) before speaking to the nation. Patience, combined with fact checking, would have prevented the War in Iraq.

And as far as the paranoia surrounding airline security and terrorism in general goes, just remember that the last two attempts to attack this country on our own soil via airliner failed miserably. Reid succeeded in only ruining his shoe and Abdulmutallab now has cajun-style testicles. Should we grow complacent? Absolutely not; the fact remains that there are people out there who want to do harm to this country and will kill innocents to get their message across. However, rules like no bathroom breaks an hour before landing, no iPods throughout the flight, no access to personal belongings during flight time, etc. seems a little overboard. If you want to improve airline security, make sure people don't bring explosives onto planes rather than assume that people can bring them on and adjust the rules accordingly. In any event, Obama has his work cut out for him; multiple problems (airline security, intelligence department communications, intelligence databases) have been identified, now fix them.

Photo - Obama speaks to the nation on Monday about the Christmas Day bombing attempt (Reuters)