It's a tough call. When you first read the details, you say "how could they let this guy get on a plane." But then, think about it - his dad called the embassy and complained about his kid. Sure, if you're a good embassy official, you add to the kid to a list of people who should be checked out. But do you revoke the guy's visa over a phone call from his dad? Then again, dad was right. But there are some half a million people on the list the guy was put on. That's a lot of people to work through, if at all.
Then again, dad wasn't just some run of the mill nut who was ticked off at his kid:
When a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official phoned the American Embassy in Abuja in October with a warning that his son had developed radical views, had disappeared and might have traveled to Yemen, embassy officials did not revoke the young man’s visa to enter the United States, which was good until June 2010.Then again, son disappears, might have gone to Yemen, and has developed radical views. That would be enough to stop you from getting a visa, I suspect. And perhaps it should be standard protocol to put a flag on someone's visa when any such warning come in, pending a review to reinstate the visa.
Instead, officials said Sunday, they marked the file of the son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa. And when they passed the information on to Washington, Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name was added to 550,000 others with some alleged terrorist connections — but not to the no-fly list. That meant no flags were raised when he used cash to buy a ticket to the United States and boarded a plane, checking no bags.
This, however, is a bit odd:
Obama administration officials scrambled to portray the episode, in which passengers and flight attendants subdued Mr. Abdulmutallab and doused the fire he had started, as a test that the air safety system passed.No it didn't. Crazy terrorist guy got on a plane with explosives, and only got caught because a passenger jumped him. That is not an example of the system working really really well. Had your wife or child or parent been on that plane - had you been on that plane - your first reaction wouldn't have been "well that went well."
“The system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days,” Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security secretary said, in an interview on “This Week” on ABC. Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, used nearly the same language on “Face the Nation” on CBS, saying that “in many ways, this system has worked.”
