Sometimes, because we live in a three-dimensional world, we are unable to firmly grasp the intangible factors that are occasionally decisive in determining success or failure in life’s events. There is always an intangible, spiritual, or mystical part of any venture that could sometimes prove critical in a project’s success or failure, and it is possible that this father’s opposition his son’s nefarious activities may have prevented the ignited underwear bomb from exploding, even after the would be bomber had activated the bomb and set himself ablaze. I am sure that the father prayed that God should hinder his son from achieving any form of success in his evil intentions. It may indeed have been divine intervention that preserved all those precious lives on that airplane that fateful Christmas day.
I was born and grew up in Nigeria, and as a Christian in a country with a large Muslim population, I have had some experience with radical Muslims. In Nigeria we were used to the never-ending conflicts between radical Muslims and their Christian neighbors, and also between radical Muslims and the rest of the society, including conflicts against their fellow Muslims. These conflicts always ended in significant loss of life and property, loss of life that usually numbered in the hundreds and sometimes in the thousands (some recent clashes here and here). Such incidents are not uncommon. Contrariwise, I have lived among Muslims who were very good and decent people, who totally abhorred these acts of violence and desired nothing more than to live in peace with their fellow human beings. If the behavior of the father, Alhaji Mutallab is any indication of how he has lived his life, then he certainly numbers among those good Muslims who have no connection with radicalism.
It is important to understand that by the time the father gave information to the US embassy, his son had not yet engaged in any overt acts of terrorism. Notice that even after he received information about the possibility of his son joining up with terrorists, he had no way of knowing that his son Umaru Farouk would eventually participate in a terrorist act. He simply acted on his worst suspicions. Notice that even if he did know that there was the possibility of his son being a terrorist, he could still have chosen not to rat out his own son. But he did. Acting on nothing more than a whim, even one as flimsy as an unusual telephone call from his estranged son, he immediately went to the American authorities and gave them all the relevant information. On the merits of his actions in this regard, his courage deserves to be acknowledged. It is perhaps fitting that the father may indeed get this recognition, which is as it should be.
Contrast this case with that of Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympics Park bomber and pro-life extremist. Even after he had committed his heinous crime – the Olympic Park bomb killed at least one person and injured over one hundred – he remained a fugitive from justice for a considerable length of time, fully aided and abetted by his supporters in the pro-life movement. It was only by a stroke of luck that he was eventually captured and brought to justice, and if his supporters in the pro-life movement had their way, this hero of theirs would never have been apprehended. But it is the same people who are now telling us why we should not have read Abdulmutallab any Miranda rights, who worked overtime to protect Eric Rudolph while he was a fugitive from justice. These are the same people working relentlessly to undermine America from within and without.
A word in passing – it is unfortunate that the American Intelligence agencies failed America and the world once again, like they have done on so many occasions. For the CIA, it appears that while they are very effective at being used by American conservatives to destabilize the governments of other nations, working hard to protect Americans is beyond their competence. After living and breathing the Cold War mindset for so long, they seem considerably limited in their capacity to provide adequate security for American citizens.
But as happy as we are that this near tragedy had a happy ending, I am unable to fully rejoice because subsequent developments reveal that the omens are still not good. After the event, a poll found that 58% of Americans would like to have the Christmas Day Bomber water-boarded (See here). Newt Gingrich would like a return to racial profiling (here). The same Newt Gingrich who called Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor a racist. How racial profiling would have prevented this attack is difficult to understand, but American conservatives never miss any opportunity to act out their prejudices of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious bigotry and all manner of oppressive tendencies. Indeed it was profiling that led to the CIA and intelligence agencies refusing to take the threat seriously in the first place. They were so busy concentrating on Middle Eastern and other “common” terrorist hotbeds that they refused to use the information that the father of the bomber gave to them. The reason Abdulmutallab was missed was because Nigeria had never been on the terrorist radar, according to the profiling at the time. They forgot that it is not through profiling that you catch the bad guys, but by doing the long, hard, tedious work of intelligence and information analysis.
One voice of reason I have heard in all of this was that of Cynthia Tucker of Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) who said on This Week with George Stephanopoulos that the father would not have been forthcoming with information if he expected the US authorities to torture his son (See here). Key quote:
“I have to disagree with George (i.e. George Will) on two of his points. The first is, yes, they had millions of dots to connect. There was a failure of common sense here. How many times does a father who is prominent, who is credible, go into an embassy and say, “I’m worried about my son?” He used two magic words, extremism and Yemen. That should have immediately moved Abdulmutallab onto the top of every watch list we have. The one with half a million people, the one with a hundred people if there is such a watch list. The other thing I disagree about is this notion of not trying Abdulmutallab in a civilian court. President Obama is handling him just as President Bush handled Richard Reed. That’s the right thing to do. We should follow the rule of law, because it helps us to get those intelligence tips. Would this father have walked into an American Embassy and given up his son if he thought he would be shipped off to some black site and tortured? I don’t think so.” (Italics added)
This is the voice of reason. But instead of a voice of reason, we are having the conservatives returning to some of the very tendencies that created the problem of terrorism in the first place, insisting on oppressing those they want to oppress. A word about Newt Gingrich, if it was ever possible to have a Department of Idiocy, Newt Gingrich would have been a leading candidate to head it. It is indeed my hope, and the hope of people all over the world who have been watching helplessly as American conservatives put America in a vice-grip that is gradually destroying this country, that American liberals will exercise their job description, and rise up to fulfill their destiny and rescue America from this slide into decay.
