Intelligence Dem: Air Force vet arrest exposes vulnerability

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said the arrest of an Air Force veteran for allegedly attempting to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) exposes concerns about the vulnerability of commercial aircraft.

The Justice Department announced Tuesday that Tairod Nathan Webster Pugh, 47, has been charged with attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIS.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Tuesday he imagined Pugh — who served in the Air Force from Oct. 1986 through Oct. 1990 — could only have provided “limited” intelligence to the terror group.

“The bigger concern I think is what he might — what kind of service he can provide in terms of aircraft, either as a mechanic assisting ISIS or, more importantly, whether he has insights into vulnerabilities of American commercial aircraft. That’s always been a key concern of ours,” he said during an interview on CNN’s “Situation Room.”

Pugh potentially could have provided insight on how to shoot down or hijack an aircraft or ”finding ways to smuggle explosives onto a plane,” according to Schiff.

Pugh served as an aircraft mechanic, assigned to the 23rd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona in 1989, and to the 581st Aircraft Generation Squadron at Woodbridge Air Base in the United Kingdom in 1987. He later worked as a contractor for the Army in Iraq in 2009 and 2010.

Schiff said he was interested in learning “what kind of work was he doing as a contractor in Iraq and why would we be employing someone who made those kind of expressions earlier about the bombings of U.S. embassies being justified?”

Intelligence officials estimates that over 20,000 foreign fighters from over 90 countries have flocked to Iraq and Syria to fight under the ISIS banner, including around 150 Americans.