The only way the events of Christmas Day could have been any worse would have been if the terrorist bombing had gone through. There's plenty of blame to go around in both the United States and the European Union for what happened, which included ignoring threats and allowing explosives into airports and onto passenger airplanes. A former teacher from Nigeria, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had taken explosives from al-Qaida in Yemen, brought those explosives to Europe unnoticed, and managed to board a plane to Detroit from Amsterdam (Flight 253) on Christmas Day with Americans and Europeans alike on board. He had become so radicalized, even at a young age, that he scared the wits out of his private school teachers and his family even called Nigerian authorities to tell them they thought this guy was a security threat. HIS OWN FAMILY TURNED HIM IN!

Or at least they tried to...

You see, the Nigerians tried to alert the Europeans and Americans about this but absolutely nothing was done about it... Unless they started the e-mail with the traditional Nigerian greeting of:

"I have inherited the estate of Prince Azkabhar and would like to transfer this $30 million USD into a western bank account. I will give you $2 million USD if you help transfer these funds through your bank account."

There is no excuse for security agencies in both the United States and Europe dropping the ball on this.

Here's probably what happened on our end in the United States:

1. Kid becomes radicalized, scares the crap out of the family
2. Family contacts Nigerian authorities, warns them about their son
3. Nigerian government contacts US and UK Embassies
4. US Embassy reports this through the ranks at the US State Department
5. State Department reports this to the Department of Homeland Security
6. DHS is under political pressure to trim down the no-fly list, so they ignore it

Of course, we share this list with our buddies in Europe, including the Netherlands, and I'm not sure what happened on their end, but everything dealing with internal security has been all screwed up by the European Union - especially in the smaller countries that rely on Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States for their security. Well, they likely looked at the US list, didn't see this guy's name on there, and figured the report from Nigeria wasn't serious if the Americans didn't care enough to put him on our giant list, which included Yusuf Islam (a.k.a. Cat Stevens) until recently. Of course, the British denied this guy a return visa after his father alerted the world intelligence community about the threat his son posed.

THANKFULLY, the crew members and at least one of the passengers were able to stop this guy from blowing up the plane. But for all practical purposes, this was an utter failure of ALL counterterrorism measures the United States and the European Union have taken. We have sacrificed a LOT of comfort and a lot of our liberties over the last 8 years to prevent terrorism, and yet al-Qaida terrorists are STILL getting aboard western aircraft with explosives.

What's worse is that there is fighting in the US Government now over who is to blame. The Department of Homeland Security is saying it never got the name from the State Department and the State Department is crying that the Department of Homeland Security simply didn't care to take the threat seriously. Well, we've already discussed on this blog the problems within the State Department under Secretary Clinton. However, the reason so many foreign names have been on the no-fly list has been almost entirely the work of the US State Department and the CIA working with Israel's list. Although Hillary Clinton has hired her own staff, the vast majority of the State Department employees are carry overs from the Bush Administration. They have always erred on the side of caution and since the size of the no-fly list is a political problem for the DHS instead of the DoS, I find it hard to believe this is a shortcoming of the State Department.

After first remarkable saying that the "the system worked" in an interview a couple days ago, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano is now agreeing with virtually everyone else in the United States that the system did in fact fail miserably. In fact, just a few months ago, we found out they were looking into conservatives as possible right-wing terrorists. When I said that they were too busy spying on us instead of the terrorists who want to kill us, this is what I meant. So what the hell is she still doing in office?

Well, that's a complex question that has a lot to do with political loyalty in the Obama Administration and the very nature of the Department of Homeland Security itself.

To keep this as short as possible, before the Department of Homeland Security, the different intelligence agencies (CIA, DIA, NSA, DoS, FBI, etc.) all acted on their information independently and passed the most important stuff up to the White House every day. The President and his advisers would then analyze the information they got from the different agencies and build policy off of that. On special occassions, all the intelligence community heads would come together in the White House for special pow-wows to discuss strategy. How specifically this system worked was up to the President. Bush trusted Clinton-appointed Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet more than Clinton himself trusted the man. As a result, Tenet was in the inner circle in the Bush Administration but had considerably less pull in the Clinton circle.

Today, the Department of Homeland Security functions literally as a political filter. It's goal is to look at what everybody in the intelligence community is doing and report that to the President. Of course, the President's time is very valuable and you only have a limited amount of time to brief him and his advisers. The idea, which Republicans foolishly supported, was that a Federal Government bureaucracy that is easily pressured politically would be far better suited to sort through what's important or not important than the President and his most trusted men and women, most of whom have decades of experience in the field.

The Department of Homeland Security is a security vulnerability and should be eliminated!

Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that everything that the DHS does is unimportant. In fact, it stole a lot of its responsibilities from other intelligence agencies and Congress even gave it some new ones that should be kept. What I'm advocating here is that these responsibilities, new and old, be delegated to the various intelligence agencies that existed prior to the rise of the Department of Homeland Security. For example, the no-fly list should be a State Department responsibility and the names should be given to them from their own sources as well as the FBI, CIA, and DIA. Domestic names should come through the FBI, foreign names through themselves, the CIA and the DIA. The State Department can then give the list to the countries we want to have the list and make sure countries are doing what they're supposed to be doing at security checkpoints. Why the DoS? Because they already have offices in every country we accept incoming flights from (a.k.a. Embassies) and ties to those governments.

After Hurricane Katrina, we saw what affect the DHS had on FEMA. Under the DHS, FEMA has become a terrorism response force training for Chemical and Biological readiness while ignoring the much more real threats posed by tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, blizzards, and earthquakes. Again, the DHS was seen creating security vulnerabilities that caused the needless suffering and death of hundreds of people.

This latest incident aboard Flight 253 to Detroit serves as yet another reminder of how inept the Department of Homeland Security really is and how much better we could be with other, non-political agencies handling its responsibilities.