Thread: NW Flight 253 Intel Failure: Negligence or Conspiracy

The Northwest Flight 253 Intelligence Failure: Negligence or Conspiracy?


by Bill Van Auken
WSWS.org
2009-12-31


In the five days since the abortive attempt by the 23-year-old Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to detonate an explosive device onboard Northwest Flight 253, information has surfaced that indicates an ostensible breakdown in US intelligence and security that is extraordinary in both its character and scale.

Among the facts now known are the following:

• Abdulmutallab’s father, a prominent retired banker and ex-government minister, had visited the US Embassy in Abuja more than a month before the attempted bombing to warn CIA officials that his son had become involved with Al Qaeda elements in Yemen. He provided them with information with which the young man could have been located, and he followed up his visit with at least two phone calls.

• For at least four months, US intelligence had information from Yemen that Al Qaeda operatives there were preparing “a Nigerianâ€

There can be no serious investigation into how the Northwest Airline bombing plot was allowed to go so far without considering whether there are elements within the US state that had an interest in seeing it happen, and therefore in suppressing the intelligence and bypassing procedures that would have stopped it.

I see...so it sounds as if Bill Van Auken is suggesting another vast right-wing conspiracy at play here. Perhaps there are elements within this administration who are sympathetic to the plight of muslims, and perhaps that sinister idology that so often emerges, only to victimize the innocent. Why not make that suggestion? It's also plausible.

Perhaps it not about politics, but rather adherence to the perverse idology that islam has proven itself to be. Isn't that what happened at Fort Hood.