The Christmas Pants Bomber

After listening to "real" experts and purging my mind of Republican bushwah, I recognized the type of operation attempted, and why it failed, although just barely.  In military parlance, there is a tactic called “getting inside of your enemy’s operational cycle time”.  It was used extensively by the US military in Desert Storm, and has its root in the German Blitzkrieg of World War II.  The tactic is, to have a time frame for successfully executing your operation inside of the operating time frame of your enemy’s “combat cycle,” you will retain the initiative and keep the enemy off balance as he tries to respond to your attacks.

To use a chess analogy here:  Al-Qaida in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula (AQSAP) had determined, probably through the sacrifice of some “pawns,” that the US intelligence services, embassies, and Homeland Security department were all functioning with a collective operational cycle time of roughly eight weeks between their acquisition of significant intelligence of a possible attack element, and the activation of proper security protocols and measures to prevent that attack.  

So, when this young Nigerian came to Al-Qaida wanting to join, they quickly realized that he would not be on anyone’s watch list, because of his multiple entry visas.  He came with all the tools to penetrate our security apparatus.  He was in effect a “bishop” on the world chessboard. He could strike all the way across the chessboard and from an unexpected direction.  However, AQSAP realized they had only 8 weeks maximum to equip him with a weapon, train him in using it, and deliver him to his target before the US security system would probably begin their “denial of passage” actions, such as pulling his visa and putting him on a no-fly watch list.  It appears AQSAP did get inside of our operational cycle time!  But then, fortunately for our side, it failed to train their “bishop” well enough in the proper method of actually detonating his bomb.

So - - if our intelligence services could reduce operational cycle time to 3 or 4 weeks, it could most likely prevent another attack of the type described above.  A State Department review of the incident showed that their current process would have revoked his visa in about another week. Also in the same time frame, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would probably have made the connection between: 1. The CIA’s report of a Nigerian’s involvement in a major attack, and,  2. The State Department/CIA report of a Nigerian father’s worry about his son’s joining a radical Islamic group in Yemen.  This would have put the son on the No-Fly list.

In order to reduce the time frame to even less than 3 weeks, our intelligence services would have to employ an “artificial intelligence” computer program based on an expert system using “fuzzy logic” to sort through all of the thousands of items picked up every day and make “the connections of points of data.”  I have a suspicion that the NSA has already developed such a tool - - if it has, it needs to share it with the other government services.  

As your representative in Congress, I will make it my priority to ensure the intelligence community, including the State Department, plays nice with each other.  Or, I will do my best to make sure they wish they had.  My message is:  “The American people expect you to protect them by playing this very real game of life and death with complete teamwork and effectiveness.  No more “Oops!  My bad!”

An interesting follow up of this case was the ruckus the Republican neocons raised about the interrogation of the suspect and his Miranda rights. After the initial interview with the suspect in the hospital, the FBI decided to go ahead and read him his Miranda rights. The Republican neocons went crazy in their criticism of the FBI for reading him his rights before turning him over to military interrogators who was supposedly going to get every ounce of information out of him through enhanced interrogation methods.

From the circumstances, I read two issues. The first is any interrogation of the suspect while he was in extreme pain from his injuries from trying to detonate the bomb would have been defined as torture especially if there was any delay in his treatment. The second is the FBI realized from their initial interrogation the suspect was a lowest level foot soldier and was intentionally held in isolation during his training for the suicide attack.

When you know you are sending someone deep into enemy territory, you don’t load them up with all of your battle plans and personnel rosters. The FBI realized he would need to be very cooperative to get any real information out of him. So, they went an found some members of his family that talked him into cooperating with the FBI to save his life or at least a very long jail term.