More significantly, for the first time, Obama said that there will be an “immediate effort to strengthen the criteria” for putting someone on the terrorist watchlists and “especially” the no-fly list. He did not give any specificity to what that means. Does it mean actually loosening the criteria from when someone goes from the 550,000 TIDE database to the no-fly list? Or loosening the criteria for putting someone on TIDE? Obama did say that State Department officials will review visa issuance and renewal information with a special eye toward counterterrorism concerns.

The documents released by the White House just say it’s the job of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center to “develop recommendations” for changing the watchlisting system, though it holds out the prospect for making “biologic and derogatory criteria for inclusion.” That actually sounds like it could make the lists more restrictive. But for additional specificity, we’ll have to see if John Brennan, the White House counterterorism chief, and Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, have anything to say about watchlisting standards at their imminent press conference.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that Obama said the U.S. needed to better communicate to the “vast majority” of peaceful Muslims that al-Qaeda offers nothing more than a “bankrupt ideology of murder and death.” Kind of hard to do that when you’re pulling them out for additional airport screening.

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. (Applause.) And we honor — we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.

He was talking about closing Guantanamo Bay, and CCR brings up Obama’s words in the context of the decision not to repatriate about 40 Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay who are cleared for release. But doesn’t this portion of the Nobel speech have more salience in the context of the new “terror prone nation” no-fly rules, which exhibit all the signs of racial profiling without forthrightly admitting that’s what it is? If you’re from a Muslim country, or a country with a lot of Muslims in it, you’re going to be pulled out of airport security and searched, even though that wouldn’t have caught shoebomber Richard Reid; even though Bush appointees Michael Chertoff and Mike Hayden argued against it on “Meet The Press”; and even though Rahm Emanuel told The New York Times’ Peter Baker that Obama “considers his speech in Cairo to the Islamic world in June central to his efforts to combat terrorism.”

What did he say in Cairo?

America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.  Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Yes, the dignity and the justice of being pulled out of line and strip searched for a bomb hidden in your anus because you share, in the broadest possible sense, the same faith or heritage as a group of murderous criminals.

The bottom line is this: the U.S. government had sufficient information to uncover this plot and to potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots that would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list. In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we already had. The information was there. Agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it, and our professionals were trained to look for it and bring it all together.

Perhaps it’s true that in Obama’s judgment there was sufficient information to uncover the plot. But it’s not true that there was sufficient information “that would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list.” As a U.S. intelligence official told me last week, there is a standard for moving someone from a person-of-interest list run by the National Counterterrorism Center to the FBI-maintained Terrorist Screening Database. That standard is “specific derogatory information leading to reasonable suspicion.” And that FBI-maintained database still has another procedural and evidentiary step to go through before placing someone on the no-fly list.

Obama can say that common sense dictates that Abdulmutallab ought to have been on the no-fly list. But that’s reasoning backward from the conclusion. It’s appropriate after a failure occurs. But it’s not appropriate as an explanation for how that failure occurred. The standard for placing someone on the no-fly list is simply not met by the aggregated intelligence that Obama cited (and he didn’t unveil any new information). If he’s not satisfied with that standard, it falls to him to change it.

As Spencer has pointed out, the State Department says it passed along the warning about Abdulmutallab from his father to the rest of the government through an interagency process. That does not appear to have alerted the FBI, which itself seems odd. But even if it had, there’s no guarantee that would have landed Abdulmutallab on the terrorism watchlist — also called the “no-fly list.”

As the 2008 FBI audit released last May explained, the FBI’s practices for nominating people to the terror watchlist were a mess. Although “FBI policy allows for the nomination of known or suspected international terrorists for whom the FBI does not have a terrorism investigation,” the controls over those nominations were “weak or nonexistent,” the report concluded. The report further found that in 15 percent of cases, terror suspects who should have been nominated for the terror watchlist were not — including one suspect who was under investigation for four years.

When Congress takes up the matter next month, it should consider why the FBI wasn’t informed about a Nigerian Muslim flying to the United States after his own father warned he was an Islamic extremist presenting a safety risk — and whether the FBI and the rest of the government has cleaned up its own procedures enough to flag a suspect like this in the future.

Just days after issuing findings that thousands of guns are being funneled illegally into Mexico, the Government Accountability Office reported that, in the last five years, folks known to be on the FBI’s terrorist watch list have tried to purchase weapons on 963 occasions — and succeeded 865 times.

The reason is simple: There’s no law against it. From the report:

Under current law, there is no basis to automatically prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives because they appear on the terrorist watch list. Rather, there must be a disqualifying factor (i.e., prohibiting information) pursuant to  federal or state law, such as a felony conviction or illegal immigration status.

Last month, New York Democratic Reps. Carolyn McCarthy and Steve Israel introduced a bill that would prevent those found to be on the Transportation Security Administration’s terrorist no-fly list from buying guns. The powerful gun lobby, however, opposes the concept of keeping Second Amendment rights from suspected terrorists.

Today, New York Democratic Reps. Carolyn McCarthy and Steve Israel took a step to change that, introducing legislation that would prohibit the roughly 2,500 people on the Transportation Security Administration’s terrorist no-fly list from buying guns.

A 2005 report from the Government Accountability Office has added fuel to the lawmakers’ concerns. During a five month period in 2004, the GAO found, firearm-related background checks were performed on 44 people discovered to be on terrorist watch lists. In 35 of those cases, the gun purchases were allowed to proceed because the buyers weren’t found to be felons, fugitives or in any other category that would disqualify them from buying weapons.

“According to the Department of Justice (Justice),” the GAO wrote, “under federal and state law, neither suspected nor actual membership in a terrorist organization is a stand-alone factor that would prohibit a person from receiving or possessing a firearm.”

More recently, the FBI found (pdf) that, of 279 potential gun buyers found in 2006 to be on the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) Violent Gang and Terrorist Organization File, only 49 were denied based on state or federal prohibitions.

Of course, even under the McCarthy-Israel bill, there would be nothing to stop these folks from buying weapons at gun shows, where unlicensed dealers aren’t required to do background checks in any event.

The National Rifle Association has yet to weigh in on the bill. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if the pro-gun group, which has a history of opposing even the slightest weapons restrictions, will support the rights of suspected terrorists to buy guns. Indeed, when a similar Senate bill was offered in 2007, the group did just that. It seems that in the eyes of the gun lobby, suspected terorists have Second Amendment rights, too.

Here’s what Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) had to say about that:

Today’s report follows a 2008 audit which found that the FBI’s terrorist watchlist is often either inaccurate or incomplete.  That the FBI continues to fail to place subjects of terrorism investigations on the watchlist is unacceptable.   Disturbingly, today’s report reveals that in 72 percent of the cases, the FBI has also failed to remove subjects from the list in a timely manner.  In fact, one individual remained on the list for nearly five years after the case had been closed.  Given the very real and negative consequences to which people on the watchlist are subjected, this is unacceptable.  As of December 31, 2008, the watchlist “contained more than 1.1 million known or suspected terrorist identities.”  With such a significant number of individuals in question, it is important that the FBI gets this right.  I will continue to raise this issue with Director Mueller.