RUTHFULLY YOURS

The speech by the president, read verbatim from notes and presented with neither force nor passion, rather than delivered spontaneously, showed that Mr. Obama was not confident with his grasp on the facts. It had been speculated by some in the New Media that a terrorist plot or terror threat could reverse the administration’s political fortunes. A dull demeanor and lacklustre announcement will not win any votes on Tuesday.

The tip-off had led to the discovery of a package at the East Midlands Airport, near Nottingham in Britain. On Friday at around 3.28 a.m local time, the package had been found at a distribution center, sent from Yemen via United Parcel Service. It had been addressed to a synagogue in Chicago. The package was placed on a helicopter and taken away for examination. Initially it was claimed in the media that the package was found to be harmless.

A second package was also found at Dubai on a FedEx plane in Dubai, again in an air cargo consignment from Yemen, similarly addressed to a Chicago synagogue. This news was reported by WAM, the official news agency of the United Arab Emirates, but may be inaccurate. FedEx does not have any offices in Yemen, states the Wall Street Journal. UPS, however, does have an office in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, featured in a photograph from the New York Times. Like the object found in Britain, the package contained a computer printer with explosives packed in its toner cartridge.

According to WAM, the Dubai Police EOD (Explosives Ordnance Disposal) Unit claimed that the substance found in the package was PETN. Additionally, there were traces of lead azide in the powder within the cartridge. Lead azide is used in detonators. PETN, or Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is the same substance that Richard Reid, the British shoe-bomber had used in his failed attempt to blow up a Paris to Miami flight on December 22, 2001, though Reid had a detonator of TATP (Triacetone triperoxide) concealed inside his shoe bomb.

PETN is also the substance that was found sewn into the underwear of the Nigerian wannabe bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009. Abdulmutallab had been in Yemen, and had apparently gained 80 grams of PETN from Al Qaeda terrorist and former imam of the Saudi-funded Dar al-Hijrah mosque in North Virginia, Anwar al-Awlaki.

DHS released a press statement:

As a precaution, DHS has taken a number of steps to enhance security. Some of these security measures will be visible while others will not. The public may recognize specific enhancements including heightened cargo screening and additional security at airports. Passengers should continue to expect an unpredictable mix of security layers that include explosives trace detection, advanced imaging technology, canine teams and pat downs, among others. As always, we remind the public to remain vigilant and report suspicious activity to local law enforcement.

On Good Morning America, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that the devices bore “hallmarks of al Qaeda, particularly al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” She said that “We are always leaning forward and thinking about what the next plot could be, and how we go after this relentless enemy.”

The interception of these two devices has brought a lot of media attention, and planes have been searched in Newark and Philadelphia. On Friday UPS announced that it would suspend its flights from Yemen.  FedEx has refused to carry any items coming originally from Yemen, and in Britain, Home Secretary Theresa May has placed an embargo on all flights from Yemen.

However, even though the event could have been used by the president to inspire confidence and even unite the nation, the president’s tone in his press conference seemed sullen. This event, in some ways, has been an embarrassment to an administration that has downgraded the special relationship between America and Israel and promoted Muslim “outreach” even within NASA. The bombs were aimed at synagogues in America. The feelings of the Jewish demographic in America have been relegated under this administration. Meanwhile the far smaller proportion of Americans who are Muslims (one or two percent) have been preferentially pandered to. The recent events show that fter all the friendly speeches, from the  Cairo address to iftar dinners, some Muslims in the world just do not want to play along with presidential touchy-feely rapprochement.

This administration has allowed Muslim Brotherhood members into the White House, even though one previous MB guest at the White House – Abdurahman Alamoudi – went on to be jailed for 23 years for terrorism. The Muslim Brotherhood believes in the destruction of Israel as a matter of policy, a fact that should always have precluded any rapprochements with these Islamists, despite the recommendations of Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke (pdf).

The strained tones of the president may have been due to being tired through campaigning for Democrat candidates. If the president had acted in a more confident manner, he could have made political capital from this situation. There is another dimension to this story that is embarrassing. The president appeared to be relying on notes, suggesting he had scant prior knowledge of this plot. John Brennan thanked the Saudis for their information that led to the interception of the devices, but it is worrying that America needed to rely upon another nation for this information.

Yemen is not a manufacturing nation, with gas and petroleum as its main exports. It is not a nation that manufactures or repairs anything remotely technological – least of all toner cartridges for computer printers. The printer in Dubai is believed to be a Hewlett-Packard.

The device that was intercepted in Dubai was in a package also containing clothing, books and magazines. The PETN was linked to a cellular phone SIM card, indicating that a phone call could detonate the device. Such phone-triggered mechanisms have been used effectively in roadside IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Thailand phone-triggered roadside IEDs have also been used to devastating effect against army patrols in the southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.

According to US Congresswoman Jane Harman, who had been briefed by the US Transportation Security Administration on Friday, one of the intercepted devices contained a SIM card and the other (the one found at East Midlands Airport) had a timer.

There has been a further twist to a story that is convoluted and full of contradictions. British intelligence suggests that the bombs were designed to blow up cargo planes while in flight, rather than being aimed at the Jewish recipients on the devices’ address labels. Theresa May, British Home Secretary, said on Saturday that the device found in Britain was viable. She said:

“The target of the device may have been an aircraft and, had it detonated, the aircraft could have been brought down. But we do not believe that the perpetrators of the attack would have known the location of the device when they planned for it to explode.”

“At this stage we have no information to indicate another attack is imminent. The threat level is already at severe, meaning that a terrorist attack in this country is highly likely. We do not plan to change that threat level at this stage.”

London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed that their early findings suggested that the device could have brought a plane down, once detonated.

Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, later reiterated the claim that the device found in Britain was thought to be detonated while still on board the cargo plane. He said:

“We cannot be sure about the timing when that was mean to take place. There is no early evidence it was designed to take place over British soil, but of course we cannot rule that out. have also spoken to President Saleh of the Yemen making the point that we have to do even more to crack down and cut out the cancer of al Qaida in Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula. We have immediately banned packages coming to or through Britain from the Yemen and we will be looking extremely carefully at any further steps we have to take. In the end these terrorists think that our interconnectedness, our openness as modern countries is what makes us weak. They are wrong – it is a source of our strength, and we will use that strength, that determination, that power and that solidarity to defeat them.”

Meanwhile, on Saturday in Yemen a woman was arrested. The president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Seni, had previously said that a house had been surrounded outside Sanaa, the capital. Later, a Yemeni official said that the woman had been arrested for her alleged involvement with the sending of the devices. She had been traced from a phone number that she had given.

The woman who was arrested was said by a Yemeni official to be

“a medical student at Sanaa University and she was arrested with her mother in a neighbourhood in the outskirts of Sanaa. Her father is a petroleum engineer who works with a company in the Hadramawt province.”

The Yemen news source “News Yemen” reported that:

Eyewitnesses said that the security authorities stormed the mother’s house in Mathbah area in the capital Sana’a and are searching for more suspects believed linked to al-Qaeda and the mail bombs.

Security source told News Yemen, on condition of anonymity, that the mother’s phone number was written on the mail bomb.

The UPS office in Yemen was closed down by the national government, and FedEx operations in the country were also ended. After earlier confusion about which plane had brought the other bomb device into the FedEx facility at Dubai, it became clear that it had brought in on a Qatari Airways plane.

Also on Saturday, President Obama spoke by phone with David Cameron and also King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

The issue of the devices found in Dubai and in Britain expose some fundamental flaws in air transportation security. It is mandatory for all goods in the cargo areas of passenger flights to be searched, according to American rules introduced in August. However, aircraft belonging to freight and import companies are not subject to the same stringent requirements.

It is obvious that FedEx and UPS will be on high alert. With millions of items being transported by these companies on a daily basis, it is likely that there will be massive delays in global parcel transportation for the foreseeable future, even if emergency legislation is not passed.

On Friday, one news outlet had suggested that an investigation into a recent plane crash in Dubai, could be widened. This crash involved a UPS-owned 747-400, which had caught fire and had crashed shortly after take-off. The investigation into the cause of the crash, which had killed the two crew members of the plane, has still not reached a conclusion, even though it has been suggested by the Federal Aviation Administration that lithium batteries may have been involved in the events leading to the crash.

The crash of the Germany-bound UPS Flight 6 at Dubai had taken place on Friday, September 3, around 8 pm, local time. The plane crashed into an air force base almost as soon as it had become airborne.  No-one on the ground had been killed. At the time of the crash, there had been a “raging fire in its hold.”

If either of these devices had gone off and caused a crash over an inhabited area, the devastation would have been enormous. On October 4, 1992, an El Al 747 cargo plane crashed into an apartment block in a suburb of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Four people who had been on the plane and 39 people on the ground were killed. The apartment block was in a “green belt” setting during the early evening. A crash over a more dense conurbation, at night when residents would be sleeping, would have been worse.

However, the use of timers – or even mobile phones – to detonate an IED would be inefficient unless a person had detailed knowledge of the flight schedules of a freight carrier. A timer would not allow for precision of target, if a crashed plane were to be the ultimate outcome of such a bomb. Schedules are frequently subjected to delay. A mobile phone would only be useful if used shortly after a plane has departed. Getting near enough to a runway to be able to identify an incoming cargo plane by its livery would also be impractical.

The unfocused aspect of such a device makes it less “effective” as a weapon than – say – an attack upon a passenger plane. From a terrorist’s point of view, the main reason for such an attack would be to cause fear, chaos, disruption of the air freight trade and economic damage. Two low-cost IED devices have already created international chaos, disruption of air cargo services, panic, and loss of trade, so in these aspects they have succeeded already….

Adrian Morgan

The Editor, Family Security Matters