Lest We Relax
I like to drive...
On December 2 [2005]-- ...New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport—a 50-year-old Egyptian man claiming to be an Iowa State University student arrived from overseas wearing an unusual pair of shoes. The man told immigration officials that his name was Gamal Badawi (not to be confused with the same-named Gamal Al Badawi, al Qaeda’s leader in Yemen, who was sentenced to death in 2004 for his involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole. His sentence was changed to 15 years in prison, but he has since escaped and his whereabouts are unknown).
... “Badawi was wearing high-top sneakers that, CBS 2 was told, had tape around them and rubber bands sticking out of them.” ... “the computerized system that takes a visitor’s fingerprints and checks it against various databases—including the terror watch list”—was down. So it appears that when the system is down, immigration officials simply clear people without checking them and, in this case, they cleared Badawi....then headed toward his next gate—to catch a Delta flight to Iowa via Chicago—when a TSA screener stopped him. Badawi’s shoes were checked for explosives and the results tested positive—five times. “The reading for explosives was off the charts,” Weinberger reported, quoting one federal source, calling the resultant reading for explosives “the highest ever.”
The TSA kept the unusual sneakers but let Badawi continue on his travels. ...—no additional federal agents were called in to investigate: not the FBI, not the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), not Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Not exactly a Jack Bauer moment…
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