Attempted airline attack raises new security concerns

The ability of a suspected terrorist to bring explosives on board a U.S. plane exposes vulnerabilities in an aviation security system that had been overhauled and strengthened since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, was able to pass through airport checkpoints and get on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam. His alleged attempt to set off a bomb containing the explosive pentaerythritol was thwarted by passengers and crew as the jetliner approached Detroit airport on Christmas Day.

Abdulmutallab, while on a list of people with suspected terrorist ties, wasn’t among those banned from flying or subject to extra screening.

“Our system did not work in this instance,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on NBC’s “Monday” show a day after saying the system had worked. “No one is happy or satisfied with that. An extensive review is under way.”

President Barack Obama ordered a review of the procedures for compiling the flight lists and deciding when a suspect warrants extra screening or should be banned from air travel, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on ABC’s “This Week.” Obama has also asked the Homeland Security Department to review airport screening capabilities, Gibbs said.

“The system did not work,” Representative Peter King of New York, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “He made it on the plane with explosives and he detonated the explosives. This came within probably seconds or inches of working.”

Standard magnetometers can’t detect explosives such as the kind that Abdulmutallab allegedly carried onto Flight 253, and that would-be shoe-bomber Richard Reid used in an attempt to blow up a Paris to Miami American Airlines flight in 2001.

The Transportation Security Administration has been adding other machines, which use millimeter waves or low-level X-rays, to find explosives. There are 40 millimeter wave machines at 19 airports, and the TSA is buying 150 new X-ray units, the agency said on its Web site.

Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who heads the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said the machines should be used more widely.

“There have been privacy concerns expressed about the use of these whole body-imaging devices, but I think those privacy concerns, which are, frankly, mild, have to fall in the face of the ability of these machines to detect material like this,” Lieberman said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Privacy concerns led the U.S. House in June to prohibit the TSA from substituting the machines for magnetometers in airports. The devices could be used to screen passengers singled out by security personnel. The Senate hasn’t taken up the bill.

“You don’t need to look at my wife and 8-year-old daughter naked in order to secure that airplane,” the measure’s sponsor, Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, said during the debate.

Rep. Charles Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican, said during the debate that magnetometers are insufficient.

“Prohibited items, like liquids and C4 for potential explosives, will be detected under the whole-body imaging technology but not under a magnetometer,” he said.

Companies such as Smiths Group Plc, Safran SA and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. may benefit from any requirement that airports buy more security equipment. London-based Smiths is the world’s biggest maker of airport scanners. Safran, based in Paris, is the world leader in biometric technologies, such as fingerprint scanners. New York-based L-3 also makes scanners for airport use.

Authorities continue to investigate Abdulmutallab, who was transferred from the University of Michigan Medical Center, where he was taken after the plane landed Dec. 25, into the custody of U.S. marshals.

U.S. officials at a court hearing Monday asked a judge to let them take a DNA sample from Abdulmutallab, and a second hearing is scheduled for Jan. 8, according to the Justice Department.

Investigators are probing whether Abdulmutallab had any ties to al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that attacked the U.S. in 2001, Napolitano said on ABC Sunday.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said Abdulmutallab had connections with Yemen, home of anti-American Muslim religious leader Anwar al-Awlaki. The imam communicated by e-mail with Fort Hood suspect Nidal Malik Hasan prior to the Nov. 5 shootings at Fort Hood that killed 13 people and injured 43.

Lawmakers questioned Sunday how Abdulmutallab was able to board the plane with the explosives, noting he was reported to U.S. authorities by his father, former First Bank of Nigeria Plc chairman Alhaji Umar Mutallab.

Abdulmutallab was on a 550,000-person list of people with suspected terrorist connections, known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE. His name wasn’t among the 14,000 people requiring more screening, or among the 4,000 people on the “no-fly” list, which would have kept him off the plane.

“It’s amazing to me that an individual like this, who was sending out so many signals, could end up getting on a plane going to the U.S.,” McConnell said.

The U.S. didn’t have credible information to stop Abdulmutallab from flying to the U.S., Napolitano said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“You need information that is specific and credible if you are going to actually bar someone from air travel,” she said.

Lieberman said on Fox that all 550,000 people on the TIDE list warrant extra attention.

“That doesn’t mean they’re convicted of any wrongdoing, but it would be basis enough to take this guy out of the line in Amsterdam and do a full body check, and that would have determined that he was carrying explosives,” Lieberman said.

The plane bore the markings of Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines Inc., which acquired Northwest Airlines Corp. in 2008. A disruptive passenger on a flight with the same number and same routing was taken into custody for questioning Sunday, said Susan Elliott, a Delta spokeswoman.

The flight crew called on law enforcement “out of an abundance of caution,” she said. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement that the incident was “non-serious” and the passenger was later released.

The Transportation Security Administration has set new rules for international flights to the U.S., requiring passengers to remain seated for the last hour of their flights. They are also barred during that period from getting anything from their bags and from keeping anything in their laps.

“The traveling public is very, very safe in this air environment,” Napolitano said on CNN. “And while we continue to investigate the source of this incident, I think the traveling public should be confident in what we are doing now.”

– Jonathan D. Salant and Roger Runningen