From staff and wire reports
U.S. Rep. Chris Carney said he plans to use his position on the House committee on Homeland Security to sort out how a man was able to smuggle explosives onto an airplane Christmas Day.
Carney is chairman of the subcommittee on management, oversight and investigations of the Homeland Security panel.
“I am quite distressed on what’s going on. I share the president’s anger on what the intelligence community did not do,” Carney said Wednesday, after participating in a groundbreaking ceremony for a planned low-income housing complex near Northumberland.
The Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day was indicted Wednesday on charges including attempted murder and trying to use a weapon of mass destruction to kill nearly 300 people.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, was traveling from Amsterdam when he tried to destroy the plane by injecting chemicals into a package of pentrite explosive concealed in his underwear, authorities say. The failed attack caused popping sounds and flames that passengers and crew rushed to extinguish.
The bomb was designed to detonate “at a time of his choosing,” the grand jury’s indictment said.
There is no specific mention of terrorism in the seven-page indictment, but President Barack Obama considers the incident a failed strike against the United States by an affiliate of al-Qaida.
Carney said congressional investigators will seek information about lapses in airplane security to prevent similar attempted terrorist attacks.
“My background is in intelligence, In fact I’m still an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, and from my committee, there is going to be a lot of hearings, and we are going to find out what went wrong. We can’t be lax. We can never let up.”
Abdulmutallab has told U.S. investigators he received training and instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. His father warned the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria that his son had drifted into extremism in Yemen, but that threat was never fully digested by the U.S. security apparatus.
Since the failed attack, airlines and the Transportation Security Administration have boosted security in airports in the U.S. and around the world. Obama has said the government had information that could have stopped the attempted attack, but intelligence agencies failed to connect the dots.
