Senators demand terror fixes after near miss with Times Square bomb attempt

A second straight close call in a domestic terrorism incident this week
brought a single mass message to the Obama administration from Senate
Democrats and Republicans: Fix the system. Again.

Both Democratic and Republican senators spent the week alternately
lauding Monday night’s arrest of Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad from a plane at New
York’s JFK Airport bound for Dubai — and condemning the fact that
Shahzad had been allowed on board a plane that had already left the gate.

{mosads}And for the second time in five months, senators from both parties
complained that a combination of poor communication and coordination
among a complex series of four federal “watchlists” had nearly caused
catastrophe.

The ultimatum to Obama: Shahzad’s arrest won’t bring new legislation,
but it had better bring changes within the executive branch.

“We’ve got to be damn careful that by no means have our efforts in
Afghanistan or other places like Pakistan worked yet,” said Sen. Frank
Lautenberg (D-N.J.) “We have to increase our diligence. There’s been a
couple of these things more than we would have liked.”

There are several different “watchlists” that the government operates,
starting with the biggest — the Terrorist Identities Datamart
Environment (TIDE) list, which holds more than a half-million names.
From there, there are three other lists of decreasing size, ending in
the 4,000-name “no-fly list.”

There is no enthusiasm among senators for new legislation, or tinkering
with the lists, or for simply designating all names on the lists with a
“no-fly” status. Indeed, several noted that the different lists allow
for different categories and degrees of suspects.

Shahzad was allowed on board a plane that had already pulled away from
the gate because he was added to the “no-fly” list within a 12-hour
window during which airlines are supposed to check their passenger
lists with federal authorities. That brought an instant fix this week
— airlines must now check the “no-fly” list every two hours.

In December, Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was arrested
only after an unsuccessful bombing attempt aboard a plane from
Amsterdam to Detroit. He was on the TIDE list, but not the actual
“no-fly” list. And poor communication among agencies had allowed
Abdulmutallab to keep his visa even though his father had warned U.S.
authorities about his son.

Several senators noted that prominent problems with the “no-fly” list
in particular stretched well back into the George W. Bush administration. The
late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) was detained five times at East
Coast airports in 2004 because the alias “T. Kennedy” was being used by
someone else. It took three weeks for federal officials to fix the
problem. In March 2006, reports emerged that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi,
a former ambassador for the Taliban, had traveled into the U.S. to
enroll at Yale University, somehow eluding any “no-fly” status.

“I’ve been on a no-fly list for the last few months, because there’s
somebody with a similar name as me,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). “No
system is perfect. I just hope there’s an after-action, where there’s
corrective action taken. I don’t know that we can ever get it perfect,
but I hope we can keep learning from these.”

It fell to Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday to defend the
administration’s hit-and-miss record. Testifying before an
appropriations subcommittee, Holder accepted some of the criticism but
repeatedly noted that Shahzad’s plane never took off and the suspect
was caught.

That wasn’t good enough for Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who wondered
why the reforms Obama ordered after the Abdulmutallab case in December
still weren’t in place.

“We’re really grouchy about the watchlist,” Mikulski told Holder. “Once
again, the watchlist seemed to be dysfunctional. Who’s in charge of
watching the watchlist?”

“It’s like nails on a blackboard. It gets us all charged up as we talk about it,” added Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Republicans were careful in their criticism this week, joining
Democrats in praising the relatively quick arrest of Shahzad but also
warning that weaknesses remain.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), ranking member of the Senate’s Homeland
Security and Governmental Accountability Committee, said part of the
problem is a mindset at agencies like the Transportation Security
Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.

“The focus has been on people coming into our country, rather than
people leaving,” Collins noted. “The terrorists are constantly
identifying vulnerabilities, weaknesses and gaps in our security
systems and that’s why it’s so critical that we learn from each case
and try to envision the rest.”

One Republican who didn’t join the criticism was John McCain (R-Ariz.),
Obama’s 2008 presidential rival, who said overall he found little fault
with the administration’s handling of Shahzad’s arrest.

“I know they lost him at one point and all that, but overall it took 53
hours and the result was one we can be pleased with,” McCain said.

Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said
foreign terrorists seem to have started recruiting “clean” subjects
like Shahzad and Abdulmutallab who won’t arouse much suspicion and are
actually educated in the U.S.

“These are American citizens living here and going to school here, and
then they leave the country to be trained,” Feinstein said. “One to
Yemen. One to Pakistan. How do you screen for that and still protect
everybody’s rights to privacy? These terrorists are smart. They think
they’ve found a soft chink in our armor, with these ‘lone wolves.’ And
it wouldn’t surprise me if there aren’t more in the country right now.”