Missed warning signs

Although his father’s warning got Abdulmutallab on the a broad list, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment repository, along with 550,000 other people, the Daily Beast has learned that no one evidently tagged the information from the Lagos embassy as a priority and then highlighted it so he would be placed into a more active suspect database (the Terrorist Screening Data Base). If they had, according to one counter-terrorism official who spoke me on the condition of anonymity, security procedures could have promptly moved Abdulmutallab to a no-fly list. (The information passed from Lagos was so generic that, according to what an unnamed U.S. administration official told Reuters on Saturday, it was not negative enough to include him on any banned flying list.)

This incident isn’t viewed by counter-terrorism officials to whom I spoke as a general flaw in the aviation security system, but rather as the isolated failure of local embassy intelligence officers to make the warning they received more specific and word it in a way that would set off the system’s warning bells. A senior administration official told the New York Times that “The information was passed into the system, but the expression of radical extremist views were very nonspecific. We were evaluating him, but the information we had was not a lot to go on.”