Out of Context

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When I was a boy, I remember having a George Carlin album in which he took on the personae of local TV news personalities in one of his routines.

One of the characters Carlin parodied was the sports anchor, who unapologetically told viewers that "I call 'em the way I see 'em ... and, if I don't see 'em, I make 'em up!"

I've been thinking about that comedy routine as I've been reading about the Christmas Day incident in which a man allegedly attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet bound for Detroit and the responses of officials — one official in particular.

Clearly this is a deadly serious matter. Nothing even remotely funny about it — except, perhaps, for how it's been handled. And that wasn't especially funny.

Given what America has been through in this decade because of terrorism, this kind of situation calls for complete candor on the part of our leaders.

But candor is the last thing we've been getting from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Instead, what we've been getting is self–serving nonsense that appears to assume that the American people are a bunch of idiots who will believe anything they are told.

Well, I can't speak for 300 million Americans. But I don't think of myself as an idiot.

In fact, I feel my intelligence was insulted when Napolitano took to the airwaves to proclaim, as she did yesterday, that "the system worked."

The truth is, the system didn't work. Officials had been alerted that the suspect — whose name is so long and has so many syllables that it will never be the kind of name that just rolls off the tongue and is instantly recognizable and, therefore, I see nothing to be gained from entering it here (besides, he's likely to be in prison for the rest of my natural life, anyway) — had developed extreme religious views and may have been in Yemen. The informant was the man's father.

In spite of this, the man's visa to enter the United States was still good. Apparently, his name was added to a computerized watch list — but not to a no–fly list, so he encountered no resistance when he bought the ticket from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Now, I understand that most of the homeland security policies and procedures were already in place when Napolitano took office. And I realize that the P.R. function of her job is important — after all, if another 9/11 occurs, someone will have to go in front of the cameras and urge Americans to keep making trips to Disneyland so the terrorists don't win.

(Frankly, I just don't see Barack Obama performing that George W. Bush–like task. It is much more plausible that he would want a Cabinet member to shill for the travel industry in such a situation. Of course, I guess that presupposes that the economy will improve enough before the next 9/11 that the travel industry could be hurt seriously enough to pose a threat to the economic recovery — assuming, once again, that a recovery gets under way before the next 9/11. But I digress.)

But her claim that the system worked was ludicrous.

What worked? The plot was foiled because the suspect was subdued by the other passengers and the bomb's trigger mechanism let him down. What role did the "system" play? None that I can see.

Then, when she had to do some fast backpedaling on the morning shows, Napolitano gambled that she could get away with blaming others. Her words, she said, had been taken out of context.

She lost that gamble.

At this point, let me say that there are times when I believe computers and the digital age have given the bad guys an unfair advantage. But the gods manage to compensate for that sometimes. And, when Napolitano said her words had been taken out of context, I simply paid a visit to ABC's website and looked at the transcript for "This Week."

I wanted to see what she said that had been taken out of context. Here is what she said:

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"Well, I think, first of all, we are investigating, as always, going backwards to see what happened and when, who knew what and when. But here — I think it's important for the public to know, there are different types of databases.

"And there were simply, throughout the law enforcement community, never information that would put this individual on a no–fly list or a selectee list. So that's number one.

"Number two, I think the important thing to recognize here is that, once this incident occurred, everything happened that should have. The passengers reacted correctly, the crew reacted correctly, within an hour to 90 minutes, all 128 flights in the air had been notified. And those flights already had taken mitigation measures on the off–chance that there was somebody else also flying with some sort of destructive intent.

"So the system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days."

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Now, "selectee list" is one of those bureaucratic phrases that could mean a lot of things. I think, for example, it could be synonymous with "watch list," but it's hard to tell.

Even if it isn't, though, here is a point that is worth remembering: While the Transportation Security Administration and the airlines do not publicize the criteria they use, some criteria are known, including a tendency to "flag" individuals who pay cash for their tickets, which the suspect did.

If the warning from the suspect's own father had not been enough for the homeland security people, the fact that he paid cash for his transatlantic ticket should have been a violation of their known standards.

On that basis alone, shouldn't he have been put on a selectee list? According to Napolitano, he was not. Those were her very words on Sunday — the words she now says were taken out of context.

OK. Show me what was taken out of context.

Today, Napolitano conceded the system did not work — but, if she has amended or retracted her claim that her words were taken out of context, I have not heard about it.

Until she does, the impression I get is of a department that is sloppily run by an incompetent administrator.