Word: abdulmutallab
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Dates: during 2009-2009
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...methods for tracking terrorists still aren't working It turns out that Washington's way of ranking likely terrorists, which was overhauled after Sept. 11, still resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. There are four different U.S. terrorism databases, and yet Abdulmutallab's name never rose above the least threatening...
...after his father visited the U.S. embassy in November and told the CIA of his son's growing radical nature, U.S. officials from at least four agencies met to share the information. But exactly what, if anything, happened next is unclear. Abdulmutallab's name was added to the more than half a million others on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) list. A spot on that roster means ... well, not very much. Abdulmutallab's open visa to visit the U.S., granted in 2008 and valid through June 2010, wasn't revoked once he made that list. Only more-damning evidence...
...another government had identified him as a person of some concern. British officials barred Abdulmutallab from entering last May after he submitted the name of a questionable school in an application to extend his student visa. That fib bounced him to a U.K. suspicious-persons list. "If you are on our watch list," British Home Secretary Alan Johnson told BBC Radio on Monday, "then you do not come into this country." But under British policy, this information was not shared with U.S. officials because Abdulmutallab had not been linked to terrorism. (Why was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab banned in Britain...
...Around the world, security measures remain inconsistent - and inconsistently applied. Abdulmutallab tried to get around the barriers by sewing an 80-g packet of PETN into the crotch of his underpants, betting that if he boarded in Lagos and transferred in Amsterdam, he would make his way undetected onto the Detroit-bound flight. That worked: during his layover, Abdulmutallab most likely encountered nothing more than ID checks and a metal detector at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. He was betting that any pat-down - unlikely as that was - would not come close to the tiny bomb in the crotch...
...another made especially for shoes, designed to work while they're still on your feet. But they have been slow to be deployed. Only one device, which sniffs the air for trace explosives, is in relatively widespread use, at just 36 airports - and it would not have detected Abdulmutallab's bomb...