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ANALYSIS / Stopping terrorist travel: The pre-Flight 253 view
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ANALYSIS / Stopping terrorist travel: The pre-Flight 253 view
If you want insight into the pre-Flight 253 homeland-security and intelligence mindset, to glean how senior levels of the homeland-security bureaucracy viewed the job DHS and the intelligence agencies were doing, and what the challenges were ahead, you can probably do no better than to set the Wayback Machine for Wednesday, December 9, 2009.
That was 16 days before the shock of the 23-year-old Nigerian man -- Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now forever known as the Underwear Bomber -- who was able to carry high explosives undetected onto an American airliner.
That morning the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing entitled Five Years After the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA): Stopping Terrorist Travel.
By "stopping terrorist travel," the committee meant, of course, travel to the United States.
In the news that day was the serious "TSA security breach," cited by Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, in which a "highly sensitive screening manual was posted online, apparently for months, without being properly redacted."
