White House to review terrorism watch-list procedures

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SAN FRANCISCO — President Barack Obama has ordered a review of terrorism watch list procedures after an
alleged attempt by a Nigerian man to detonate a bomb on a passenger
plane as it landed in Detroit, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday.

The U.S. government is also reviewing the ability of
airport security to detect dangerous substances because the man was
carrying the high-explosive PETN, Gibbs added in an interview on “This
Week” with George Stephanopoulos.

On Friday, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, boarded Northwest Airlines flight 253 in Amsterdam, an Airbus 330 bound for Detroit
with 278 passengers and 11 crew members. Passengers told news services
that late in the flight, Abdulmutallab spent 20 minutes in the
bathroom, and then returned to his seat, complained of stomach upset,
and pulled a blanket over himself.

As the plane was preparing to land, they heard a
popping noise, smelled smoke, and spotted Abdulmutallab’s pants and the
wall of the plane on fire. Flight crew members used extinguishers to
put out the flames and passengers subdued Abdulmutallab, reports said.
The plane landed safely.

The FBI on Saturday filed a criminal complaint in U.S. District Court in Detroit, charging Abdulmutallab with a “willful attempt to destroy an aircraft” and placing an explosive device on a plane.

The complaint says that attached to Abdulmutallab’s
body was a device containing the highly explosive PETN. Abdulmutallab
was arrested and taken for treatment for burns at University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, and U.S. District Judge Paul Borman read him the charges there.

The suspect’s name appeared in a U.S. database of
terror-related individuals, the Terrorist Identities Datamart
Environment. But reports say that none of the information the
government had on Abdulmutallab warranted placing him on the U.S.’s
official terror watch list or no-fly list.

The database of terror-related individuals contains
about 550,000 names, while the no-fly list has roughly 4,000 on it,
Gibbs said Sunday.

In the wake of the incident, Gibbs said the government is conducting two “look back” reviews.

One will review watch-listing procedures to check if
authorities did everything they could have with the information they
had, he explained.

Abdulmutallab was put on the larger watch list in
November, Gibbs noted. Media reports say that Abdulmutallab’s father, a
prominent Nigerian banker, had warned U.S. and Nigerian authorities
last month that his son had developed extreme religious views.

“How does a person on terrorism watch list get a
U.S. visa? Particularly when his father was concerned about his son’s
proclivities,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on Stephanopoulos’ program. “There’s much to investigate here.”

McConnell also said it “makes common sense” that
people on terror-related databases should automatically be subject to
additional security at airports.

The other review will focus on “detection capabilities” to investigate how someone managed to get on a plane in Amsterdam with something as dangerous at PETN, Gibbs said.

PETN is the same explosive that Richard Reid, a London-born convert to Islam, attempted to ignite in his shoe aboard an American Airlines flight in December 2001, media reports said.