Word: visas
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...ticket for flights from Lagos to Amsterdam to Detroit and paid for it in cash. He left no contact information with the airline. He checked no bags. Seven months earlier, he had earned himself a spot on a security watch list in Britain after applying for a visa to attend a dubious English university. And when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab broke off contact with his family in October to join the war on the West, his own father reported him as a possible threat at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, where he met with a CIA officer. (Terrorism on Flight...
...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 could have kicked his name up to the next level - the Terrorist Screening Database (TSD), a list of 400,000 people who merit closer watch. That...
...British government placed Abdulmutallab on its watch list in May after he cited a nonexistent school in his application for a student visa. "If you are on our watch list, then you do not come into this country," Alan Johnson, Britain's Home Secretary, told the BBC on Monday, Dec. 28. (See the Detroit terrorism suspect's Nigeria connections...
Abdulmutallab apparently wrote on visa documents that he was traveling to the U.S. for a religious ceremony. On Friday afternoon, Representative Peter King, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said in television interviews that Abdulmutallab's name had appeared in databases as having a connection to terrorists. It is still unclear how long he had lived in London or when he had lived in Nigeria...
...charges of especially egregious hypocrisy. It's no secret that Brazil, especially under hugely popular President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has become a hemispheric counterweight to the U.S. And it loves to play tit-for-tat with Washington. Because Washington still insists Brazilians secure a visa before entering the U.S., Brasilia makes Americans pay for a "reciprocal" permit to get into Brazil; after the U.S. started thumb-printing foreigners in immigration lines after 9/11, Brazil obliged Americans to do the same. Those are understandable counterjabs. But while no one is suggesting that the Brazilian justice system...