Cops fear 25 British-born Muslims are plotting to bomb Western airlines.
FAILED plane bomber Umar Abdulmutallab has bragged to FBI agents that there are more young men plotting to launch attacks on the West.
The 23-year-old Nigerian has told security chiefs of a sinister network in Yemen who are ready and waiting to strike.
The reports come after The Sun revealed that cops fear that 25 British-born Muslims are plotting to bomb Western airliners.
Handling the problem by POTUS & Team Zero.
Politico‘s Carol E. Lee has an interesting story today on President Obama’s “by-now familiar pattern…for dealing with unexpected problems.” As best we can figure, the Obama damage control strategy consists of these 5 easy steps:
Step 1: Deny seriousness of issue.
Step 2: Deny any admin responibility/failure.
Step 3: Have spokespeople convey O’s feelings to public.
Step 4: Blame Bush admin.
Step 5: Concede the issue days later.
I feel so safe now knowing that there are more than just a few waiting to come in from Yemen.
Abu Bakr al-Qirbi appealed for more help from the international community to help to train and equip counter-terrorist forces.
His plea came after an al-Qaeda group based in Yemen claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day airliner bomb plot.
h/t Nazareth Priest
Analysis: Detroit terror attack is a major intelligence and security failure – Telegraph.
Tough questions need to be asked of not just the US security agencies – such as the CIA and the FBI – but also of Britain’s MI6, MI5 and the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorist unit.
How can a Muslim student, whose name appears on a US law enforcement database, be granted a visa to travel to America, allegedly acquire an explosive device from Yemen, a country awash with al-Qaeda terrorists, and avoid detection from the world’s most sophisticated spy agencies?
Why is it that the best coverage of our news is made by foreign journalists?
But wait, there is more and this time covered by our press.
Flight 253 passenger: Sharp-dressed man aided terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab onto plane without passport.
Kurt Haskell's boarding pass for NWA Flight 253
A Michigan man who was aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 says he witnessed Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab trying to board the plane in Amsterdam without a passport.
Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich., who posted an earlier comment about his experience, talked exclusively with MLive.com and confirmed he was on the flight by sending a picture of his boarding pass. He and his wife, Lori, were returning from a safari in Uganda when they boarded the NWA flight on Friday.
Haskell said he and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man.
Kurt and Lori Haskell are attorneys with
Haskell Law Firm in Taylor. Their expertise includes bankruptcy, family law and estate planning.
While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time.’”
Mutallab is Nigerian. Haskell believes the man may have been trying to garner sympathy for Mutallab’s lack of documents by portraying him as a Sudanese refugee.
The ticket agent referred Mutallab and his companion to her manager down the hall, and Haskell didn’t see Mutallab again until after he allegedly tried to detonate an explosive on the plane.
Sympathy? They do it all the time?
Haskell said the flight was mostly unremarkable. That was until he heard a flight attendant say she smelled smoke, just after the pilot announced the plane would land in Detroit in 10 minutes. Haskell got out of his seat to view the brewing commotion.
“I stood up and walked a couple feet ahead to get a closer look, and that’s when I
saw the flames,” said Haskell, who sat about seven rows behind Mutallab. “It started to spread pretty quickly. It went up the wall, all the way to ceiling.”
Haskell, who described Mutallab as a diminutive man who looks like a teenager, said about 30 seconds passed between the first mention of smoke and when Mutallab was subdued by fellow passengers.
“He didn’t fight back at all. This wasn’t a big skirmish,” Haskell said. “A couple guys jumped on him and hauled him away.”
President Obama is popular, but world leaders are finding it easy to say no to him.
Who’s afraid of POTUS now? Uhm, no one.
World leaders accustomed to saying no monitored the new administration for a while and then resumed their old habits.
Of course, every no merits its own explanation. In some cases (Saudi Arabia, Israel), it was lack of preparation on Obama’s side. In others (Iran), the naiveté or wishful thinking of an inexperienced president. With certain regimes (Cuba, North Korea), it was simply business as usual.
But then there are those oopsy moments.
The president has made many mistakes. Some were seemingly harmless—like his failed last-minute attempt to bring the Olympics to Chicago. And some were far more worrisome, such as Obama’s disastrous meeting with Saudi King Abdullah, in which the king “launched a tirade” about refusing to “show reciprocal gestures to Israel,” as Obama had requested.
World leaders seem to be taking pleasure in rebuffing him, disappointing him, even, in some cases, mocking him. French President Nicolas Sarkozy famously called Obama an “inexperienced, ill-prepared” leader.
I was surprised that Sakozy didn’t label him a cry baby after the Olympic’s debacle.
Obama can write—and he can speak—but if he can’t fight, he’ll find it hard to achieve his goals. If he can’t fight, he isn’t scary. And evidently, being popular didn’t help him much. In fact, you might even say that being popular made it more difficult for Obama to succeed. He was too popular for his own good, annoyingly popular, distractingly popular. When a TV interviewer asked Sarkozy whether there was “competition for leadership” between him and Obama, the Frenchman responded, “there’s no competition,” but he was demonstrably annoyed.
Ah yes, Mr. Popularity.
Obama’s popularity with the people of the world is something local leaders feel an instinctive urge to resist.
Unhinged by Obama’s conciliatory tone, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez suggested that the president is the devil without worrying much about possible consequences. Iranians have more confidence in Obama than they had in Bush—only more reason for supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to point out that he can’t tell the difference.
Retaliation? No invite to the party? Never.
In fact, no world leader has paid a price for disappointing Obama. With Obama so nice and so conciliatory, risking retaliation by the White House doesn’t seem all that dangerous. If resisting Bush’s policies was a political necessity, encouraged and driven by the anger of the masses (ask Britain’s Tony Blair about that), resisting Obama has become trendy, almost cool, because it gives world leaders the chance to stand taller, to be an equal member of the club of the clashing rock stars.
UPDATE: Janet speaketh:
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said that the thwarting of the attempt to blow up the Amsterdam-Detroit flight this week demonstrated that “the system worked.”
Asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley on “State of the Union” how that could be possible when the young Nigerian who sought to set off the bomb was able to smuggle explosive liquid onto the flight, Napolitano responded: “We’re asking the same questions.”
Young, privileged, educated Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab had the world at his feet.
Instead, the son of one of Nigeria’s most important figures opted to make his impact in a very different way – by detonating 80g of explosives sewn into his underpants, and trying to destroy a passenger jet as it came in to land at Detroit Airport on Christmas Day
Abdulmutallab, 23, had lived a gilded life, and, for the three years he studied in London, he stayed in a £2m flat. He was from a very different background to many of the other al-Qa’ida recruits who opt for martyrdom. Via Wealthy, quiet, unassuming: the Christmas Day bomb suspect.
I can see that match.com bio now when he is released from prison for commission of a crime (Eric Holder’s new definition of terrorism). Wealthy, educated, unassuming, slightly disfigured, burnt snarklies…a result of poor judgment.
So, why did this clown have a Visa and a ticket to fly into this country when he had been denied one in England?
Abdulmutallab has been on a list of persons with terrorist connections for around two years, and in November, his father, former economics minister of Nigeria and former Chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria, reported his son’s radical politics and possible terrorist sympathies to the American embassy in Nigeria. The elder Abdulmutallab says that he is “‘surprised’ his son had been allowed to travel after he had reported him to the authorities.” And Great Britain refused to grant Abdulmutallab a visa when he tried to return to England in May.
Obama’s classification for misunderstood. Hey, remember England said NO VISA to Bill Ayers?
Hero.
Schuringa, sitting in seat 20J, in the right-most section of the Airbus 330, looked to his left. “I saw smoke rising from a seat … I didn’t hesitate. I just jumped,” he said.
Schuringa dove over four passengers to reach Abdul Mutallab’s seat. The suspect had a blanket on his lap. “It was smoking and there were flames coming from beneath his legs.”
“I searched on his body parts and he had his pants open. He had something strapped to his legs.”
The unassuming hero ripped the flaming, molten object — which resembled a small, white shampoo bottle — off Abdul Mutallab’s left leg, near his crotch. He said he put out the fire with his bare hands.
Schuringa yelled for water, and members of the flight crew soon appeared with fire extinguishers. Then, he said, he hauled the suspect out of the seat.
via Passenger details fight to stop alleged terrorist – NYPOST.com.
