"a major intelligence and security failure"

Telegraph.co.uk:

Tough questions need to be asked of not just the US security agencies – such as the CIA and the FBI – but also of Britain's MI6, MI5 and the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorist unit.

How can a Muslim student, whose name appears on a US law enforcement database, be granted a visa to travel to America, allegedly acquire an explosive device from Yemen, a country awash with al-Qaeda terrorists, and avoid detection from the world's most sophisticated spy agencies?

Every intelligence agency across the world is fully aware that the targets of choice for al-Qaeda and its numerous affiliates and sympathisers are airliners – preferably those flying to the US. Yet Abdulmutallab seems to have avoided detection in both Nigeria and Holland when he passed through the various security checks at Lagos and Schiphol airports respectively.

Embarrassingly for the Washington, Lagos airport had recently been given the "all clear" by the US's Transportation Security Administration, an agency established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks which was supposed to improve the security on American airliners.

I might argue that the security and intelligence agencies didn't fail... they were hand-cuffed by politicians who wouldn't let them do their jobs and hampered by those within these agencies who go along to get along.

Lives will be lost because politicians and their illogical notions of tolerance and dhimmitude are getting in the way of people doing what they're trained to do.

Political correctness kills.

Crossposted(*).

Comments

[Locutisprime]

It is not the security and intelligence agencies jobs or responsibilities to screen airline passengers.

That would be the job and responsibilities of individual countries and their air safety agencies.

That the man got through the Nigerian (non) security is not any amazement, but that he came through Amsterdam unscathed? That speaks directly to our egalitarian socialist controlled world IMO. And the ability of the egalitarian socialist to permeate every aspect of the reasoned minds and turn them into insipid mush as it concerns the realistic threats of terrorism in the world today.

It will take at the least a Chernobyl level attack that surpasses 9/11 before people are awakened from their stupor.