This paper examines critical weaknesses in U.S. airport security, focusing on inter-agency and intra-agency coordination failures that persist despite the 2007 Aviation Transportation System Security Plan. Using the 2009 Christmas Day bombing attempt by Abdul Farouk Mutallab as a case study, the paper illustrates how breakdowns in information sharing between agencies — including the CIA, State Department, and National Counterterrorism Center — continue to undermine aviation safety. The paper then evaluates prospects for meaningful reform, arguing that constitutional constraints on profiling and the prevailing tool-focused screening methodology prevent the U.S. from adopting the behavioral and intelligence-driven approaches successfully employed in Israel.
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The paper uses a case-study-as-evidence technique: rather than listing general failures abstractly, it presents the Christmas Day 2009 attack attempt as a single illustrative example that exposes systemic gaps in the 2007 Security Plan. This method — letting one well-chosen incident carry the argumentative burden — is an efficient and persuasive strategy in policy analysis writing.
The paper opens by summarizing the stated goals of the 2007 Aviation Transportation System Security Plan and its multi-agency framework. It then pivots to the Mutallab case to demonstrate real-world failure of those principles. The second half shifts to forward-looking analysis, examining why constitutional and legal constraints may prevent the U.S. from adopting more effective, intelligence-led screening methods like those used in Israel. The conclusion is implicit in the final paragraph's pessimistic assessment.
The Aviation Transportation System Security Plan of 2007 outlines important principles for effective inter-agency and intra-agency coordination as a fundamental component of ensuring the safety and security of domestic aviation in the United States and of international aviation destined for American airports. That document presents sound ideas and a breakdown of agency-specific responsibilities among the principal agencies responsible for aviation security, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the U.S. State Department.
Unfortunately, several high-profile events that have occurred since the 2007 publication of that document demonstrate that, to a large extent, the most fundamental aspects of both intra-agency and inter-agency coordination and sharing of crucial information had still not been achieved more than three years later. Specifically, prior to the Christmas Day 2009 attempt by Abdul Farouk Mutallab to detonate explosives on board a Delta Airlines flight to Detroit from Amsterdam, his father had communicated specific concerns about his son to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria (Kelly, 2009).
Those concerns were not communicated to the National Counterterrorism Center or cross-linked with information in the possession of the CIA about a Nigerian being prepared for a terrorist attack on U.S. aviation (Kelly, 2009). That incident alone illustrates the relative meaninglessness of the principles outlined in the 2007 Aviation Transportation System Security Plan, by virtue of continuing failures in the efficient analysis and dissemination of even the most basic information related to counterterrorism concerns. Moreover, Mutallab was issued a U.S. student visa despite the fact that he had been listed on the U.K. Terrorist Watch List in May 2008 and had never been placed on the U.S. No-Fly List (Kelly, 2009).
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