Christmas Bomber as a 'Patsy'

Webster Tarpley, an astute observer of intelligence affairs (and lots of other things), writes about the Christmas Bomber:

The Detroit Christmas bomber was deliberately and intentionally allowed to keep his US entry visa as the result of a national security override issued by an as yet unknown US intelligence or law-enforcement agency with the goal of blocking the State Department’s planned revocation of that visa. This is the result of hearings held on January 27 before the House Homeland Security Committee, and in particular of the testimony of Patrick F. Kennedy, Undersecretary of State for Management. The rickety US government official version of the December 25 Detroit underwear bomber incident, which has been jerry-built over the past month and a half, has now totally collapsed, and key elements of the terrorism-spawning rogue network inside US agencies and departments are unusually vulnerable to a determined campaign of exposure.

Based on what was already known a few days after this incident, it was clear that normal screening and surveillance procedures had been scrapped and aborted in order to allow the youthful patsy Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria to board his flight from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Detroit. Mutallab’s father, a rich, well known, and reputable Nigerian banker had gone to the US Embassy in his country and formally warned a State Department official as well as a CIA representative that his son was in Yemen and in all probability consorting with terrorists. Under normal circumstances, this report alone would have been more than enough to get Mutallab’s US visa revoked in the same way he had already been denied entry to Great Britain. He also would normally have been placed on the no-fly list, thus setting up two insuperable obstacles to getting on his Detroit bound flight and winging off to produce an incident which caused several weeks of public hysteria in this country, completely with demands for body scanners in airports. In addition, the US intelligence community had reports that a Nigerian was training with the purported “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” in Yemen. Obama had called a December 22 meeting with top CIA, FBI, and DHS officials because of reports of a terrorist attack looming during the Christmas holiday.

But the important testimony came from Kennedy, whose responsibilities include Consular Services, and therefore visas. In his opening statement, Kennedy offered a tortured circumlocution to describe what had happened. Attempting to head off the question of why the State Department had not revoked Mutallab’s visa, Kennedy stated:

“We will use revocation authority prior to interagency consultation in circumstances where we believe there is an immediate threat. Revocation is an important tool in our border security arsenal. At the same time, expeditious coordination with our national security partners is not to be underestimated. There have been numerous cases where our unilateral and uncoordinated revocation would have disrupted important investigations that were underway by one of our national security partners. They had the individual under investigation and our revocation action would have disclosed the U.S. Government’s interest in the individual and ended our colleagues’ ability to quietly pursue the case and identify terrorists’ plans and co-conspirators.”

Not surprisingly, House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) wanted to know what that really meant.

REP. THOMPSON: Okay. So — all right. So he has a visa. So what does that do? In the process, does it revoke the visa? Does it —

MR. KENNEDY: We — as I mentioned in my statement, Mr. Chairman, if we unilaterally revoked a visa — and there was a case recently up — we have a request from a law enforcement agency to not revoke the visa. We came across information; we said this is a dangerous person. We were ready to revoke the visa. We then went to the community and said, should we revoke this visa? And one of the members — and we’d be glad to give you that out of — in private — said, please do not revoke this visa. We have eyes on this person. We are following this person who has the visa for the purpose of trying roll up an entire network, not just stop one person. So we will revoke the visa of any individual who is a threat to the United States, but we do take one preliminary step. We ask our law enforcement and intelligence community partners, do you have eyes on this person, and so you want us to let this person proceed under your surveillance so that you may potentially break a larger plot?

REP. THOMPSON: Well, I think that the point that I’m trying to get at is, is this just another box you’re checking, or is that some security value to add in that box, to the list?

MR. KENNEDY: The intelligence and law enforcement community tell us that they believe in certain cases that there’s a higher value of them following this person so they can find his or her co-conspirators and roll up an entire plot against the United States, rather than simply knock out one soldier in that effort.

What Kennedy is saying is that the established bureaucratic routine calls for the State Department to inquire of the other intelligence and law enforcement agencies that compose the US intelligence community whether they have any objection to the lifting of a visa. In this case, reports Kennedy, there was such an objection from at least one agency, based on their contention that Mutallab was under intensive scrutiny as part of an operation which might lead to the discovery and arrest of far bigger fish. We should also notice that Kennedy is extremely reluctant to speak before the committee in public session about exactly which intelligence or law-enforcement agency this was, and that the members of the committee do not demand an immediate straight answer. Perhaps Kennedy told them later, behind the closed doors of a secret executive session. But after weeks of hysteria, the public has a right to know.

Now comes Tarpley's interesting interpretation, from which he writes his essays and books on the subject:

What we see here is a classic example of the use of a national security override on the part of subversive moles who are performing their most basic responsibility of protecting a patsy by preventing him from being arrested or otherwise interfered with until that patsy can perform his assigned task and produce the desired incident, with the goal of inducing an intensive political response in the form of a wave of public hysteria. With this method, the name of the patsy is in effect flagged in all the relevant databases with the notation that this person is the target of an ongoing investigation which cannot be interfered with because of overriding national security concerns. This means that the patsy in question is immune to arrest by traffic cops, airport and border officials, or any other law enforcement official. The patsy is untouchable — until of course the terrorist provocation has been carried out.

Various alleged 9/11 figures operated for extended periods of time inside the US, evidently under the cover of such national security overrides. How did the accused 19 9/11 hijackers enter and leave this country, obtain visas, rent apartments, acquire checking accounts and credit cards, obtain driver’s licenses, register vehicles, rent cars, attend flight schools, and repeatedly fly on US domestic airlines? How did they escape arrest for traffic violations, which some of them committed? The answer is in all likelihood that they had been made untouchable to ordinary law enforcement because their names had been flagged with national security overrides which made them immune to arrest for routine infractions or because their names appeared on watch lists and similar databases.

There is every reason to conclude that the rogue network of moles operating inside US intelligence — otherwise known as the invisible government or shadow government — knew that Mutallab was coming, knew that he would be carrying a device resembling a bomb, and wanted him to enter the skies over Detroit. (Whether Mutallab’s handlers thought they were giving him a bomb that would actually go off is a separate question.) They did all this because they sincerely wanted a major terrorist provocation of the US population, designed to unleash waves of Islamophobic hysteria that would be useful for the support of ongoing operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and quite possibly against Iran.