Your Questions About Abdulmutallab’s Visa: Answered

The key question about how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab retained his visa to enter the U.S. centers on the connection between the terror watchlist he was on and State Department visa procedures. Here I was, working on an explainer about precisely that connection, when Mark Hosenball beat me to it. And he did an absolutely amazing job.

In a nutshell: Abdulmutallab got on something called the TIDE database after his father, Alhaji Mutallab, told U.S. officials at the embassy in Abuja, Nigeria about his budding extremism. That was last month. But Abdulmutallab already had a visa to enter the U.S. — one that was issued in June 2008 and valid until 2010. Hosenball picks up what happened after concerned embassy officials put Abdulmutallab’s name into a program called Viper that the State Department uses to track visa recipients:

The VIPER entry based on Alhaji Mutallab’s warning to the Embassy included a notice that if or when Umar applied for an extension or renewal of his existing US visa, then the case should be thoroughly examined in light of the father’s concerns about the son, said the official. But this did not constitute an explicit instruction either that his current visa should be revoked or that any application for a fresh or extended visa should be denied. It is not clear whether the people who operated the TIDE data base were aware that Abdulmutallab had a valid US visa at the time the report on him from Abuja reached US intelligence.

Two things to watch at the congressional hearings next month. First, the relationship between TIDE and VIPER. And second, the related issue of whether TIDE placement should automatically warrant the Homeland Security equivalent of an all-points bulletin. The danger there is that TIDE already has 550,000 names on it. Hosenball again:

“You get a lot of info everyday,” said one official close to the process. “Some of it is bad. Someone cannot just go into the data base and then go onto a ‘no fly list.’“ For example, the official said, the TIDE data base contains the names of Irish Republican Army partisans who were involved in militant and possible violent activity in the past, but who are not regarded as any kind of threat to transportation today.

There’s an understandable impulse to redress the Abdulmutallab failure by basically treating someone’s placement on TIDE as, essentially, probable cause. But it could actually be counterproductive, sending overtaxed intelligence and law enforcement officials off chasing false positives. Watch next month for how Homeland Security officials discuss this balance before angry members of Congress.