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The story of Flight 253 exposed a raft of glaring flaws in the global aviation-security network. Almost all are well known to aviation experts. Yet what President Obama eventually called a "systemic failure" caught his Administration flat-footed for the first 72 hours after the attack, as officials initially tried to play down the weaknesses of the web Abdulmutallab slipped through. More than eight years after 9/11 and 21 years after Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in midair over Scotland, the attempted Christmas bombing revealed that the array of protective measures put in place around the world still can't stop terrorists from smuggling explosives onto packed jetliners.
The attack reverberated beyond airport security lines, though those have already become longer and more complicated. The airline scare represented the second time in the past 12 months that purported Islamic terrorists have tried to launch a strike on American soil--and may be the first time that such an assault was directed from Yemen. That's a reminder that the struggle against jihadism is not confined to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where U.S. forces are now concentrated. In its provenance and near catastrophic outcome, the story of Flight 253 is a reminder that the war on terrorism is far from over--and may be spreading. To prevent another attack, here are four lessons the U.S. and its allies will need to learn:
1 | Our methods for tracking terrorists still aren't working
It turns out that Washington's way of ranking likely terrorists, which was overhauled after Sept. 11, still resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. There are four different U.S. terrorism databases, and yet Abdulmutallab's name never rose above the least threatening one.
One day after his father visited the U.S. embassy in November and told the CIA of his son's growing radical nature, U.S. officials from at least four agencies met to share the information. But exactly what, if anything, happened next is unclear. Abdulmutallab's name was added to the more than half a million others on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) list. A spot on that roster means ... well, not very much. Abdulmutallab's open visa to visit the U.S., granted in 2008 and valid through June 2010, wasn't revoked once he made that list. Only more-damning evidence could have kicked his name up to the next level--the Terrorist Screening Database (TSD), a list of 400,000 people who merit closer watch. That would not necessarily have affected his journey to Detroit. That's because the TSD list has two sublists: one consisting of about 14,000 people who are permitted to fly to the U.S. after extra airport screening, and a set of 3,400 on the no-fly list, who cannot board commercial aircraft in or bound for the U.S. under any condition. Unfortunately, Abdulmutallab was a long way from a spot on either.