Hope and Fail

White House spin: From ‘system worked’ to ‘systemic failure’

After the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack in Detroit, the White House sent out Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to reassure the American public that boarding a commercial airliner is still safe.

Their comments on the Sunday news programs were quickly walked back and ultimately rejected by the president himself.

Gibbs and Napoliano appeared on four news shows Sunday, and on three of them they said the U.S. security system “worked.”

Here’s Gibbs on CBS’s Face the Nation:

We’re going to go through the capabilities for detecting and we’re going to look through the watch-listing procedures again–some of which are older and evaluate whether or not they’re up to date for the types of threats and security concerns that we have. I do think though that in many ways this system has worked. We just have to continue to keep refining it and stay ahead of what terrorists are trying to do.

Napolitano on ABC’s This Week:

I think it’s important for the public to know, there are different types of databases.

And there were simply, throughout the law enforcement community, never information that would put this individual on a no-fly list or a selectee list. So that’s number one.

Number two, I think the important thing to recognize here is that once this incident occurred, everything happened that should have. The passengers reacted correctly, the crew reacted correctly, within an hour to 90 minutes, all 128 flights in the air had been notified. And those flights already had taken mitigation measures on the off-chance that there was somebody else also flying with some sort of destructive intent.

So the system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days.

And Napolitano on CNN’s State of the Union:

One thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked. Everybody played an important role here. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action. Within literally an hour to 90 minutes of the incident occurring, all 128 flights in the air had been notified to take some special measures in light of what had occurred on the Northwest Airlines flight. We instituted new measures on the ground and at screening areas, both here in the United States and in Europe, where this flight originated.

So the whole process of making sure that we respond properly, correctly and effectively went very smoothly.

The next day, Napolitano was back on TV walking back those statements, claiming she was taken out of context by critics who accurately pointed out that the system, in fact, did not work.

Here she is on NBC’s Today show:

And on Fox and Friends:

Out of context or not, Napolitano is wrong either way. Even if you parse her statements down to “the system worked” after the attempted attack.

The message Gibbs and Napolitano sent on Sunday was that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the terrorist, would not have wound up on any sort of no-fly list anyway. She said on ABC that “throughout the law enforcement community, never information that would put this individual on a no-fly list or a selectee list. So that’s number one.”

Well, the more the government reviews what happened, the more that becomes false. Turns out, the CIA began tracking Abdulmutallab back in August:

CBS News has learned that as early as August of 2009 the Central Intelligence Agency was picking up information on a person of interest dubbed “The Nigerian,” suspected of meeting with “terrorist elements” in Yemen.

Sources tell CBS News “The Nigerian” has now turned out to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But that connection was not made when Abudulmutallab’s father went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria three months later, on November 19, 2009. It was then he expressed deep concerns to a CIA officer about his son’s ties to extremists in Yemen, a hotbed of al Qaeda activity.

So today, the president rejected Gibbs’ and Napolitano’s assertions, calling the incident a “systemic failure.”

When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been, so that this extremist boards a plane with dangerous explosives that could cost nearly 300 lives, a systemic failure has occurred. And I consider that totally unacceptable.

The reviews I’ve ordered will surely tell us more. But what already is apparent is that there was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security.

It’s understandable that after each terrorist attack or attempted attack that holes in the security apparatus will become known — but to react to such attacks by claiming the “system worked” when it clearly failed is just stupid.