If you ask me, another sign of Bush Administration incompetence. What the frack was the TSA doing in all these years? If my luggage got searched over a dozen times, and I was set aside for special screening nearly as frequently, how come David Hadley didn’t get the same attention? Either he did, and the TSA was too incompetent to notice he was a person of interest or he didn’t, which defeats the whole purpose of screening passengers at O’Hare. Right?
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An American charged with helping plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, moved effortlessly between the United States, Pakistan and India for nearly seven years, training at a militant camp in Pakistan on five occasions, according to a plea agreement released by the Justice Department last week.
RelatedThe odyssey of David C. Headley, 49, included scouting targets in several cities in India and meeting with a senior operative of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These and other new details of Mr. Headley’s activities, contained in the plea agreement, raise troubling questions about how an American citizen could travel for so long undetected from his home base in Chicago to well-established terrorist training camps in Pakistan.
[Click to continue reading American Terror Suspect Traveled Unimpeded – NYTimes.com]
Not until Obama’s people took office did authorities even bother to track Headley:
The visit in February 2009 may finally have put Mr. Headley on the radar of the American authorities, who started tracking him in the late spring of last year, Mr. Riedel said. Mr. Kashmiri is considered to be one of Al Qaeda’s most dangerous commanders. The Long War Journal, a Web site that specializes in reports on militancy, says he is a former member of Pakistan’s elite commando Special Services Group, though Pakistani intelligence officials deny that. He was the target of a drone attack last September. After initial reports that he was killed, it appears that he survived, according to Pakistani officials and militants.
I know the ineffectualness of the Bush appointees is a bit of a cliché, but come on. Yellow alerts? Remove your shoes? What was the point exactly? Oh yeah, keeping ‘Murica safe.