Abdulmutallab (TWA "Christmas Bomber") Had a Visa Denial Reversed

The WaPo has a bit of a ho-hum story tonight about the complicated visa history of the "Christmas Bomber," young Mister Abdulmutallab of Nigeria.

Visa denial was reversed for terrorism suspect in 2004:

A U.S. consular official originally denied terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab a visa to enter the United States in 2004 after finding false information on his application, but that official was overruled by a supervisor, according to senior government sources.

-- snip --

Abdulmutallab's visa history was recently shared with the Senate Intelligence Committee and House lawmakers, who have been exploring whether the government missed any red flags and could have prevented the Nigerian from entering the country.

-- snip --

Officials said the consulate supervisor who authorized Abdulmutallab's visa concluded that he had strong ties to Nigeria and no derogatory information in his background and that his inaccurate answer about having been denied a visa might have been based on a misunderstanding.

"When that judgment was reviewed, the supervisor concluded that this was not a willful misrepresentation and that he had the intent of returning home after visiting the United States," one official explained.

The bottom line is that the 18 year-old Abdulmutallab committed a non-material error on his first visa application, which was forgiven based upon his lack of willful misrepresentation and his strong ties to Nigeria, i.e., his Daddy's $$$$$$$. This all happened before he was radicalized and became a security threat.

Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

As is usually the case, I found the on-line comments readers made about the story more interesting, and sometimes providing a better interpretation of the event, than the news article itself. Here are two if the 32 comments posted as of midnight Thursday:

(MEppinger wrote)

Junior consular officers, who conduct visa interviews in all or our embassies and consulates, are often the most strict in interpreting the regs and denying visas. They take a lot of flack for it, and get a lot of pressure, some from their immediate supervisors, some from higher in the embassy, but MOST from members of Congress.

Congress, before you light into our career diplomats, do us a favor and take a look at your own "constituent services" staff. In particular, look at the boilerplate text of letters sent out in your name when a constituent (or, on occasion, a non-voting resident of your district) complains about a visa denial for a friend or relative. Before you castigate State, change your own office's policies. Only weigh in for people personally and favorably known to you. Help lead all branches of government in defending the integrity of our visa processes. 99% of the time, junior officers are out their on the front lines on their own. They only hear from Congress when a complaint comes in about a visa denied. Why not start but having their backs on visa denials?!

(When you think about it that way, when you think about actually saying "no" to an unknown constituent who writes for help with a visa, it gets a lot harder, doesn't it?)

State Department consular supervisors put pressure on their junior officers to reverse visa denials in part because of their own years of having to justify having denied this or that visa, including answering hundreds of letters from members of Congress over visa denials.

Visa decisions are the most petty and the most crucial part of our front-line defenses. At the same time that you ask State to make some changes, Congress, do your part.

And,

(deparker2001 wrote)

As a retired consular officer--no I was not the reviewer in 2004. I retired in 2002--please permit me to add a modicum of reality to this discussion.

For the misrepresentation to be a grounds for the denial of a visa application it must be "material." That means that the information must be so important that were the truth to be known, then the visa would be denied. Now a previous application is not material and that fact can be easily discovered through normal name checks which probably occurred in this case. In any event the visa issuance was perfectly valid in this case. The young man traveled to the US and left the country. And he wasn't a jihadist in those days, as far as we know. So a "security officer" would not have found any reason to refuse his visa application in 2004.

The problem with this case has nothing to do with the visa issuance. The problem was the lack of coordination between intelligence and law enforcement agencies. If the information regarding the training of jihadists in Yemen had been known and if someone had checked up on some of these young men, then they might have known that this chap was a danger in 2009. If there are fixes to be made, then they must be made within the intelligence community.

Both of those readers sound like they know what they are talking about.

Background Briefing on Christmas Day Terror Plot

Senior State Department officials gave the press a briefing today following the release of the White House review of the Christmas Day terror plot. It shed some light on the question of why the State Department did not immediately know that Abdulmutallab had a U.S. visa, and why the lack of that knowledge wasn't really pertinent to the matter of why the visa wasn't revoked before he got on his flight to the U.S.

Read the entire briefing here. A few quotes:

QUESTION: The one thing that the report says about the State Department is that there was a misspelling of the name. Whose misspelling was that?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Okay. There was --

QUESTION: Where?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Someone checked, and I’m not going to go into who, but some --

QUESTION: No, no, no. I’m asking which agency, not which specific person.

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: State Department. State Department checked to see if the person had a visa. There was a dropped letter in that – there was a misspelling. They used a very – they checked the system. It didn’t come back positive. And so for a while, no one knew that this person had a visa.

-- snip --

QUESTION: So, wait, can I just finish my question? So I’m not – so when it went to NCTC, then they spelled it right and you realized that he had a visa?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Yes.

QUESTION: So you’re just saying for like a week or so, or a couple of weeks?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: No – I don’t know if anyone – I don’t think anyone – no one may have checked for a visa until Christmas Day.

-- Snip --

QUESTION: Do you think that the misspelling of the name and not finding the fact that he had a visa had anything to do with whether he would be classified a PB3 [potential terrorist] or a B3 [terrorist]?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: No. Well, P3B was put in because there was a possibility, because he’s –

QUESTION: Right.

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: -- the interview. As far as being anything else, no, I don’t think there was – I don’t think the not knowing that he didn’t have a visa, not reporting that – and the report says that. It says: “A determination to revoke his visa, however, would have only occurred if there had been a successful integration of the intelligence by the CT community, resulting in his being watch-listed.” So --

QUESTION: So even if he was he was spelled – even if it was spelled right and you knew he had a visa, he still wouldn’t have been – it still wouldn’t have been revoked?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: That’s correct.

-- Snip --

QUESTION: Isn’t – actually, isn’t the visa issue kind of a bit of a red herring here, because –

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: That’s – exactly.

QUESTION: If he had made – if he had gotten onto the 3B list, it doesn’t matter if he had a visa or not; he wouldn’t have been able to get on the plane.

QUESTION: That’s right.

NW Airlines Bomb Flap Escalates

Two news stories released tonight have the potential to further heat up the already heated Washington flap over who-knew-what-and-when about Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the would-be Christmas bomber of Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

The first story is from the Washington Times, quoting an anonymous U.S. intelligence official who connects AbdulMutallab with the Muslim imam who was the religious adviser of the perpetrator of last month's Fort Hood massacre. If true, that could enhance the political fallout over the Flight 253 attack.

The Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner had his suicide mission personally blessed in Yemen by Anwar al-Awlaki, the same Muslim imam suspected of radicalizing the Fort Hood shooting suspect, a U.S. intelligence source has told The Washington Times.

The intelligence official, who is familiar with the FBI's interrogation of Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, said the bombing suspect has boasted of his jihad training during interrogation by the FBI and has said it included final exhortations by Mr. al-Awlak.

The second story comes from the Wall Street Journal, likewise quotes anonymous U.S. government officials, and it blames both the CIA and NSA for either sitting on or failing to correctly interpret intelligence about AbdulMutallab. Our intelligence agencies are notoriously reluctant to share terrorist threat information, but they are more than eager to point the finger at each other when politically threatened themselves.

President Barack Obama said a "catastrophic breach" allowed the alleged Christmas Day bomber to set his attack into motion, as it emerged that multiple U.S. agencies met in mid-November to discuss a warning from the accused bomber's father.

The president said he made his comments because new information pointed to a serious breach of national security. He said a warning made by the suspect's father to U.S. officials in Nigeria "could have and should have" led to the suspect to be banned from flying. "A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable," he said.

He suggested other intelligence failures were also to blame. "There were bits of information available within the intelligence community that could have and should have been pieced together," he said. "It's becoming clear that the system that has been in place for years now is not sufficiently up to date to take full advantage of the information we collect and the knowledge we have."

This could spin up into a nasty little scandal.

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Update: CNN has joined the fun with its own story (CIA failed to circulate report about bombing suspect) quoting multiple and contradictory anonymous officials:

AbdulMutallab [the elder one] talked about his son's extremist views with someone from the CIA and a report was prepared, but the report was not circulated outside the agency, a reliable source told CNN's Jeanne Meserve on Tuesday.

Had that information been shared, the 23-year-old Nigerian who is alleged to have bungled an attempt to blow up a jetliner as it was landing in Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day might have been denied passage on the Northwest Airlines flight, the source said.

U.S. officials said the father, a former Nigerian banker, expressed his concerns about his son's radicalization during at least one meeting and several calls with officials at the embassy in Nigeria.

The information on AbdulMutallab had been sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but it sat there for five weeks and was not disseminated, the source said.

-- snip --

An administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the federal government had information that should have been assessed and meshed with other information "that would have allowed us to disrupt the attempted terrorist attack" before the suspect boarded the jet.

"What we have here is a situation in which the failings were individual, organizational, systemic and technological," the official said. "We ended up in a situation where a single point of failure in the system put our security at risk, where human error was compounded by systemic deficiencies in a way that we cannot allow to continue."

But an [anonymous] intelligence official said that the son's name, passport number and possible connection to extremists were indeed disseminated. "I'm not aware of a magic piece of intelligence somehow withheld that would have put AbdulMutallab on the no-fly list," the official said.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly [finally, a named official!] said department staff did what they were supposed to have done by sending a cable to the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington about the matter. Kelly said any decision to have revoked the suspect's visa would have been an interagency decision.

But [an anonymous] U.S. government official said the information in the cable offered nothing specific and was just one of hundreds of such reports that the center evaluates daily.

This is getting good.