Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Homeland "Security" ---Who's Kidding Whom?

This is the Department which will be screening immigrants, too.

A declassified report confirms that Annie Jacobsen accurately recounted suspicious activities on a Northwest flight from Detroit to Los Angeles in the summer of 2004, and that a number of Syrians attempted a dry run for a terror attack.

...The Homeland Security personnel involved did not pass the irnformation along to their Operations Center, even though the leader of the group had been involved in a similar incident in January of that year, on Frontier Airlines. It didn't get logged into the HSOC database until the Washington Times reported it on July 26, 2004. By that time, all 12 Syrians had left the country.

TSA, for its part, said that the matter did not merit a referral since all of the passengers could be "cleared". It's fuzzy about why they thought that, since the DHS found a pattern of suspicious activity for eight of the men involved, including a "similar" incident involving the leader five months earlier. His third time, on a trip back from Istanbul, the FBI finally detained him.
DHS rejects the TSA excuse, stating categorically that the incident should have been logged into the HSOC and merited further investigation.

Can't even keep their own story straight.

HT: Captain's Quarters

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