ThE PrIvAtiZaTiOn Of $eCuRiTy AnD ThE MiLiTaRiZaTiOn Of $oCiEtY-PaRt I

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Yemen, Energy Crisis, & the Nigerian Crotch Bomber

By Dr. Nafeez Ahmed (@) Sibel Edmonds-Boiling Frogs

On Christmas Day, 2009, 23-year old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, allegedly tried to blow up a plane on route from Amsterdam to Detroit by detonating a device stitched to his underwear. Fortunately, in yet another example of the level of sophistication of the new league of violent extremists, Abdulmutallab succeeded only in setting fire to his own crotch, before being apprehended by fellow passengers.

Security officials now reveal that the attack was planned by an al-Qaeda network in Yemen, where Abdulmutallab was apparently radicalized and trained, although he had been originally recruited, they say, in London. During his stint in London as a student, Abdulmutallab had been President of the Islamic Society at University College London.

The incident has been described as a major intelligence failure exposing the ongoing weakness of US and British security infrastructures and procedures. According to President Barack Obama, intelligence agencies were unable to “connect and understand” separate strands of information that would have alerted them to the attempted attack. “What we have here is a situation in which the failings were individual, organizational, systemic and technological,” said one US official. “We ended up in a situation where a single point of failure in the system put our security at risk, where human error was compounded by systemic deficiencies in a way that we cannot allow to continue.”

More simply: no one is to blame.

===snipped===>British Security Surveillance

The problem is that the official narrative is already hopelessly littered with contradictions. Abdulmutallab was apparently first added to the UK Border Agency’s immigration watch list in May 2009 after failing to get a UK entry visa. “His refusal was not on national security grounds”, claimed an early BBC report rather earnestly, “but because he had been tagged as a potential illegal immigrant because he had applied to study at a bogus college… This would, in theory, have prevented him from entering the UK – but not from passing through the country, if he was in transit to another country.”

===snipped===>CIA and NSA

The narrative from the American side has now also taken shape. Security analyst Tom Burghardt provides a meticulous overview: Abdulmutallab was placed in a “catch-all” US terrorism watch list, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), containing 550,000 individuals. This by itself was not enough to put him on a no-fly list. But in September 2009, the National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly picked up intercepts among al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen planning an imminent terror plot by a Nigerian man. The intercepts were translated and disseminated “across classified computer networks”, including the National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC) run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Then in November, Abdulmutallab’s father, a former top Nigerian government official, provided detailed information to the US embassy in Nigeria warning that his son was a violent extremist.

“The father of terrorism suspect Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab talked about his son’s extremist views with someone from the CIA and a report was prepared, but the report was not circulated outside the agency”, reported CNN. The information supposedly sat in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virgina, for five weeks. Yet it is not actually clear whether this was indeed the case: “But an intelligence official said that the son’s name, passport number and possible connection to extremists were indeed disseminated”, CNN continued. “State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said department staff did what they were supposed to have done by sending a cable to the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington about the matter.”

“But officials did not revoke his two-year multiple-entry visa, which was issued in June 2008” added the BBC. “Instead, Mr Abdulmutallab’s file was marked for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa.”

And the State Department’s initial justification for this studious inaction? … (drum roll)… the information received contained “nothing specific” that would have alerted authorities to the attack.

===snipped===>"And Ye Shall Know The Truth and The Truth Will Set You Free"

WAKE UP AMERICA.....IT(s) OUR COUNTRY!!!

Love "Light" and Energy

_Don

References:

[Flight 253: Anatomy of a Cover-Up]

[The Wages of Fear in Israel and the U.S.]

[Mossad's "Islamic Militants" Exposed In Yemen]

[The Merchants of Fear: Israel's Profiting from Homeland Insecurity]

[The Privatization of Security & the Militarization of Society-Part II]

[The Privatization of Security & the Militarization of Society- Part III]

[Dr. Nafeez Ahmed provides an overview of the role played by US military & intelligence practices in the creation of terrorism.] MP3