AIhmed Mohamed Nasser al-Soofi and the Rule of Common Sense
By John H Huey on September 1, 2010 at 8:30 PM in Current Affairs
Editor’s Note: John Huey, a security professional involved with aviation security issues for over 28 years, has published several articles for NoQuarter. Learn more about John Huey below this post.
Every year, as we approach the anniversary of that dreadful day in September of 2001, US and European Aviation, as well as other Western target sites, intuitively go to a higher state of situational awareness given the remembered events.
When Ahmed al-Soofi, a legal US resident Yemini national, presented himself for TSA security screening in Birmingham, Alabama last Sunday the security process should have produced an immediate, on the spot, alert requiring positive vetting of al-Soofi’s identity, intent and associations prior to his being allowed to go forward by air to his ultimate destination of Sana, Yemen.
The reason that Mr. al-Soofi should have been delayed in Birmingham (once I got a look at the images of the items found in his bags) is that it is very clear that a number of elements that have been used in conjunction with explosives in the past (cell phones, watches, liquid containers) were in proximity to one another, and bound in a way, that VERY closely resembled the shape and form of actual improvised devices that have been in the al-Qaeda playbook. The fact that they LOOKED like IED’s without actually being explosive raises a whole other set of questions.
Any reasonably well trained supervisor standing at that checkpoint should have seen and been aware of the following:
1. A checked bag containing items that were configured in the shape and using some of the elements of an Improvised Explosive Device.
2. A traveler on his way to Yemen which has been a recent staging ground for an actual explosive attack (Christmas Day, 2009) that used a routing to the US through Amsterdam which was also on al-Soofi’s itinerary.
3. The stated intention of US Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen, to use legal US residents and other US nationals to further their aims.
4. The recent designation by the CIA of al-Qaeda in Yemen as the single biggest threat and staging area for terrorism directed at the US.
Under these circumstances the fact that al-Soofi was sent on his way from the point of origin without further investigation is profoundly disturbing.
It wasn’t until a change in itinerary (reportedly initiated by the Airline due to a missed flight) resulting in a mis-routing of the suspect bag to Washington, the arrival on the Passenger Name Record of the Chicago-Amsterdam flight of another Yemeni with a last minute itinerary change, the pulling of the un-accompanied bag from al-Soofi’s original Washington-Dubai flight (a whole other issue) and the very belated connection of some fairly obvious dots that the alarm bells started (loudly and internationally) ringing.
As we can see from the list of risk indicators above none of the questions that should have been asked about Mr. al-Soofi were related to race or religion in any way and were operational questions related to actual terrorist threat. It’s clearly obvious that those questions should have been asked in Birmingham, Alabama, NOT the lock up in Amsterdam.
TSA screening personnel are not trained Law Enforcement Officer level counter terrorism investigators but they need to have enough training and common sense (along with an awareness of the nature and origin of the threat) to pick up the phone and ask for help.
If an expert FBI investigator from the local Birmingham field office had been brought into the picture here in the US it is quite likely that the worst outcome for al-Soofi would have been a travel delay of one day. The other gentleman involved, Mr. al-Murisi, would quite likely have never seen the inside of a cell at all.
If we could reach Mr. al-Soofi in Amsterdam today (he just was let out of the Dutch lock up this morning, Wednesday, September 1) I think he would probably agree that if some fairly simple proper questioning had been done in Alabama that this whole incident would have been more of a footnote in his life rather than the highlight it will now be.
Email: jhuey92@yahoo.com
John Huey’s constructive critiques first were published at NoQuarterUSA.net on January 5, 2010 in “From An Insider: The Need for Risk-Analysis, High-Threat Screening Lanes & Checkpoints” and in several subsequent posts. Among John’s most recent posts were “How Error Metastasizes: Europeans Take a Page Out of Our Playbook at the Checkpoint” and “Of Car Bombs and Consequences.”
by Ronald Scott
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