Obama Receiving Report on Airline Attack Probe
VOA News 31 December 2009
President Barack Obama is receiving a preliminary report Thursday on how a young Nigerian man allegedly boarded a U.S.-bound jetliner with explosives for an attempted Christmas Day attack last Friday.
Mr. Obama said Tuesday a "mix of human and systemic failures" contributed to a "potential catastrophic breach of security" in which 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab smuggled the explosives on the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
The father of the suspect, a prominent Nigerian banker and former government minister, had warned U.S. officials in Nigeria about his son's extremist views. The son was placed in a U.S. government database, but not on the list that would have prevented him from boarding that plane.
The U.S. president Tuesday said there was information available within the intelligence community that could have been shared, triggering warning signs that would have put the suspect on the no-fly list.
Abdulmutallab, who said he was trained by al-Qaida operatives in Yemen, allegedly tried and failed to detonate explosives concealed on his body.
The focus of the probe appears to be aimed at the National Counterterrorism Center, the main agency charged with collecting and analyzing intelligence gathered by many key government agencies. U.S. news outlets say the probe has found that other government entities, such as the CIA and the State Department, also failed to aggressively follow up on information.
The president also ordered a probe of aviation-screening initiatives at U.S. airports. Dutch and Nigerian officials both announced Wednesday they will begin using full-body scanners on some flights.
The scanners, unlike metal detectors, produce a whole-body image of a passenger and can reveal plastic or chemical explosives hidden in clothing.
But some privacy advocates oppose the security scanners. They say the devices, which display a detailed image of a passenger's body on a computer screen, invade privacy and may not be 100 percent effective anyway.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.
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