Forget Technology. This Was A Human Intelligence Failure.

By Dan Verton

The successful smuggling of explosives aboard a U.S.-bound aircraft on Christmas day should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed America's post-9/11 security efforts. Homeland Security Television documented this gaping hole in U.S. airline security two years ago. Unfortunately, very little has changed in our nation's commitment to prevent explosives from being smuggled aboard airplanes.

There are two aspects of this incident, however, that should come as a shock to all Americans -- namely, the utter failure of our ability to identify potential terrorists and the ignorant appraisal of our government's response by the nation's top homeland security official.

While the TSA has for years touted its new program to train TSA employees to conduct personality and behaviorial analysis to detect potential terrorists from ever boarding an aircraft, the larger international airline system apparently remains highly vulnerable even in the face of glaring red flags. In the case of the Christmas Day plot, we failed to question a young man from Nigeria on whom we had a series of intelligence reports detailing his connections to al-Qaeda, who had paid cash for his ticket, was travelling with no luggage, and wasn't wearing a winter jacket during a December trip to Detroit, Michigan.

Even if the intelligence community had not shared a single shred of information with other agencies about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253, the obvious behaviorial red flags should have been enough to send him to a detailed secondary screening in Amsterdam. This failure is much less an indictment of our information sharing or technology shortfalls than it is a glaring example of our inability to actively profile and ferret out the terrorists from the travelling public. The multitude of airport security officials who without question looked at this young man probably on multiple occasions that day failed in their most basic mission.

When word broke of the successful attack (HSTV considers this a successful terrorist attack since the device made it aboard the flight and the only thing preventing the deaths of hundreds of innocent people was the ineptitude of the attacker), Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano went on national television and told the world that "the system worked." She later retracted the statement and said she meant the response to the attack worked. Even President Barack Obama came to her defense, saying Napolitano meant that “once the suspect attempted to take down Flight 253, after his attempt, it’s clear that passengers and crew, our homeland security systems and our aviation security took all appropriate actions.”

I don't care who may have instructed Napolitano to make such a public comment. She should have known better. Nothing the U.S. government, especially the Department of Homeland Security, did on that day had anything to do with that plane landing safely. The only "system" that worked on Dec. 25, 2009 was the passengers aboard Northwest Flight 253. If your idea of the homeland security "system" is civilians having to do hand-to-hand combat with terrorists aboard commerical aircraft in order to save their own lives, then you have no business being the nation's Secretary of Homeland Security. Passengers and crew are the last line of defense -- a mechanism that should kick in only after the "system" of homeland security precautions has failed in total. And that's what happened yet again, eight years after Sept. 11, 2001.

This one incident and Secretary Napolitano's response to it is enough for Homeland Security Television to say our confidence in Secretary Napolitano's leadership of the most important post-Cold War agency has been severely shaken. This incident, coming eight years after our nation pledged to never again allow such large-scale systemic failures to happen, is completely unacceptable. And as the leader or DHS and the senior homeland security official in our government, Secretary Napolitano is responsible for everything the agency does and fails to do. In this instance they failed to protect us from start to finish. It may already be time to find new leadership at the Department of Homeland Security.