WHAT WENT WRONG in the Christmas Day bombing? The Senate Intelligence Committee report identifies fourteen “points of failure.” Failure No. 2 is the decision not to put Abdulmutallab on the “no fly” list, which the intel committee attributes to “the language of the watchlisting standard, the manner in which it was being interpreted at the time, or both.”
Hang on. The intel committee is saying that the Bush Administration had made it too hard to put people on the watchlist? Was that the result of some previously unnoticed, late-breaking wave of Bush Administration squishiness on terrorism? Not exactly. What the intel committee doesn’t mention is a concerted 2008 campaign, led by the ACLU, that was intended to make the watchlisting standard more rigid, and did. Here’s what I said in Skating on Stilts about the Christmas Day errors:
Imagine for a minute that you were a security official watching the ACLU press conference in 2008. You see that the organization got the number of names on the list wrong, trashed TSA for a problem they’d created themselves, and received fawning coverage for it. Do you really want to stick your head over the parapet and suggest a substantial expansion of lists that the ACLU says are already “out of control” and are victimizing tens of millions of Americans? Nope, in those circumstances, there wasn’t much chance that standards for getting on the lists would be eased, or that TSA would soon get operational access to the other 95 percent of the database.
In the end when all is said and done, the investigations of the incident will find errors in how the agencies handled the lists and the screening. But when they do, for once we should skip the football analogies.
The errors weren’t “fumbles” or “dropped balls.” Instead, the most apt analogy comes from tennis.
Because if ever there were a “forced error” in policy making, this is it.
And as in tennis, full credit should go to the privacy advocates that forced it.
Well, the unclassified report is out. And it says pretty much what I expected, except that the authors, who fearlessly trashed the State Department, NCTC, NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, couldn’t muster the courage to credit the privacy lobby for its dubious achievement.