Airline Passengers Turn Into Heroes

Once again, it’s all about the heroics. The people ultimately made the difference between a plane landing safely in Detroit or an absolute terrorist disaster at Christmastime. Details from The New York Times...

By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LIPTON
Published: December 26, 2009

Despite the billions spent since 2001 on intelligence and counterterrorism programs, sophisticated airport scanners and elaborate watch lists, it was something simpler that averted disaster on a Christmas Day flight to Detroit: alert and courageous passengers and crew members.

David Schilke, 49, of Livonia, Mich., was traveling with his wife, Iliana, and their son, and sat two rows behind the suspect.

David Schilke, 49, of Livonia, Mich., was traveling with his wife, Iliana, and their son, and sat two rows behind the suspect.

Richard and Dawn Griffith were aboard the Northwest flight. Mr. Griffith praised the crew as having helped prevent panic.

During 19 hours of travel, aboard two flights across three continents, law enforcement officials said, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab bided his time. Then, just as Northwest Flight 253 finally began its final approach to Detroit around noon on Friday, he tried to ignite the incendiary powder mixture he had taped to his leg, they said.

There were popping sounds, smoke and a commotion as passengers cried out in alarm and tried to see what was happening. One woman shouted, “What are you doing?” and another called out, “Fire!”

And then history repeated itself. Just as occurred before Christmas in 2001, when Richard C. Reid tried to ignite plastic explosives hidden in his shoe on a trans-Atlantic flight, fellow passengers jumped on Mr. Abdulmutallab, restraining the 23-year-old Nigerian.

Jasper Schuringa, a Dutch film director seated in the same row as Mr. Abdulmutallab but on the other side of the aircraft, saw what looked like an object on fire in the suspect’s lap and “freaked,” he told CNN.

“Without any hesitation, I just jumped over all the seats,” Mr. Schuringa said, in an account that other passengers confirmed.“I was thinking, Oh, he’s trying to blow up the plane. I was trying to search his body for any explosive. I took some kind of object that was already melting and smoking, and I tried to put out the fire and when I did that I was also restraining the suspect.”

Mr. Schuringa said he had burned his hands slightly as he grappled with Mr. Abdulmutallab, aided by other passengers among the 289 on board, and began to shout for water.

“But then the fire was getting worse, so I grabbed the suspect out of the seat,” Mr. Schuringa said. Flight attendants ran up with fire extinguishers, doused the flames and helped Mr. Schuringa walk Mr. Abdulmutallab to first class, where he was stripped, searched and locked in handcuffs.

“The whole plane was screaming — but the suspect, he didn’t say a word,” Mr. Schuringa said.

He shrugged off praise for his swift action, which he said was reflexive. “When you hear a pop on the plane, you’re awake, trust me,” he said. “I just jumped. I didn’t think. I went over there and tried to save the plane.”

In an affidavit filed in court, an F.B.I. agent said that Mr. Abdulmutallab stayed in the bathroom for 20 minutes before the attempt, returned to his seat, told his seatmates that his stomach was upset and covered himself with a blanket. It was then that the smoke and popping sounds began.

After he was subdued and the fire extinguished, a flight attendant asked him what had been in his pocket, and he answered, “explosive device,” the affidavit said. The powder was identified by the F.B.I. as PETN, a high explosive.

The close call was followed by several tense hours as counterterrorism officials checked on other United States-bound flights to determine whether more planes were targets, as in the thwarted 2006 plot to smuggle liquid explosives aboard multiple flights leaving from Britain.

They found no immediate signs that other flights were in danger, officials said. They tightened airport security, ordering new restrictions on carry-on luggage and passenger movement inside the cabin, but did not elevate the nation’s threat level, which has been at orange since 2006.

Dozens of investigators led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation were working Saturday to understand exactly how a passenger managed to get PETN and a syringe of chemicals aboard the flight. Intelligence agencies were studying intercepted communications to see whether clues were missed and to assess whether the incident could presage more attacks.

David Schilke, 49, of Livonia, Mich., who works in the information technology department at the Ford Motor Company, was traveling home from Moscow with his wife, Iliana, and their 5-year-old son, sitting two rows behind the suspect. He said he heard a pop, and then someone asking for water and screams coming from the rows in front of him. The fire, he said, lasted for a full minute.

“The guy wasn’t fighting or doing anything,” Mr. Schilke said. “He was just sitting there in the flames. I was shocked that he would do that.” He added that he was surprised at how little panic there was. Many passengers who were farther away thought the pops were from fireworks, he said.

Richard Griffith, 41, of Pontiac, Mich., who said he had been sitting in the back of the plane during the episode, praised the crew for its professionalism in preventing panic.

Mr. Griffith said the passenger who had been sitting next to the suspect told him the suspect got up once midflight to use the bathroom and returned to the bathroom about 20 or 30 minutes before the attempt, apparently to brush his teeth. Otherwise, he said, “He just sat there; he didn’t talk to nobody.”

The episode, which riveted the attention of President Obama on vacation in Hawaii and prompted counterterrorism officials to rush back to work, capped a year in which plots of violence inside the United States have surged. The attempt appeared to underscore the continuing determination of Muslim militants to kill Americans more than eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Passengers transferring from foreign flights at the Amsterdam airport, where Mr. Abdulmutallab changed planes and boarded the flight bound for Detroit, are required to be screened by security there before taking off on another flight, an airport spokeswoman said Saturday. She could not confirm the details in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s case but said he was presumably subject to that sort of screening.

Investigators planned to interview all the passengers on the suspect’s flights and to look over any security-camera video footage of him, a law enforcement official said.

Mr. Abdulmutallab apparently left Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos aboard KLM Flight 588, a Boeing 777, at 11 on Christmas Eve and arrived at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam a little early, at 5:37 a.m. on Christmas Day.

Three hours later, at 8:54 a.m., Northwest 253, an Airbus A330, took off for Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, with three pilots, eight flight attendants and the 278 passengers.

Amsterdam has long been an airport of concern for American aviation security officials, like other major gateways in Europe, including London, Brussels and Frankfurt, where the Transportation Security Administration sees an unusually large number of hits from people on so-called selectee or no-fly lists associated with security threats, one former senior Homeland Security official said.

In 2007, the Amsterdam airport began testing body-scanning machines that can find threats hidden under passengers’ clothing, but there are only 10 such machines out of 200 security checkpoints at the sprawling airport. In the United States, the T.S.A. has begun to substitute similar machines, called millimeter-wave technology, for walk-through metal detectors.

“Those will pick up anything underneath clothing,” said Edmund S. Hawley, who served as the agency’s administrator until January. “If he had it taped to his leg, it could have easily identified something there.”

Mr. Hawley said of Al Qaeda and like-minded militants: “They have been trying since 2001, and they are going to keep trying. You have to keep your vigilance up over the long term. That is the hard thing.”

Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt in Washington, Sarah Lyall in London, Micheline Maynard and Nick Bunkley in Detroit, and Matthew L. Wald in Sarasota, Fla.
Sign in to Recommend Next Article in US (2 of 20) » A version of this article appeared in print on December 27, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire

Ok. Here we go…

Since Thanksgiving, we’ve engulfed ourselves in the Holiday traditions.  We pull out our decorations from the past, hung year after year on the Christmas tree. Some of us use the same tree, while many of us bring freshly cut, aromatic pines and spruces home, to be adorned,  watered, and ultimately enjoyed…

Nat King Cole always sounds good as he sings The Christmas Song. We listen to him, Doris Day, Robert Goulet, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and others for four weeks or so, sing our Carols and Hymns, worship the birth of our Savior, and wish each other the compliments of the season…

Andy Williams was right. It is indeed the most wonderful time of the year…

Merry Christmas.

Gearing Up For the Cup

The world changes every four years…No, we’re not talking elections or change in governments. We’re talking football. All eyes in the world of football are focused on just who will be playing whom in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa…

The lowdown from The New York Times…

December 4, 2009
In World Cup Draw, Conspiracy Theories Abound
By JERÉ LONGMAN

It is anyone’s guess how the 32 teams in the 2010 World Cup will be grouped by the draw Friday in South Africa, but one thing is for sure: the event will elicit sightings of things as far-fetched as U.F.O.’s and the Virgin Mary’s image on a potato chip.

Soccer luminaries, with the help of the honorary hostess Charlize Theron, will pull plastic balls out of pots to determine the eight first-round groupings of four teams each. Someone will inevitably claim that the draw was rigged. No proof? No problem. Not since “Forrest Gump” have table tennis balls supposedly been so vulnerable to manipulation and sleight of hand.

Television networks around the world will be on alert. They will replay the video forward and backward, in regular speed and slow motion, seeking evidence of plots and schemes, as if this were a sporting equivalent of the Zapruder film.

At the draw for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, Sophia Loren picked a ball that placed the United States in the host team’s group. Considering that the Americans had not played in the World Cup in 40 years, this struck some as akin to putting the Yankees in the same group as the winner of the Little League World Series.

None other than the soccer legend Diego Maradona claimed the draw was rigged to favor the host Italians over defending champion Argentina. Those who saw conspiracy speculated that Loren had magnetized her rings to pick a certain magnetic ball out of the pot.

At the draw for the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the television network Sky Italia thought it saw duplicity in the way the former German soccer star Lothar Matthäus selected Italy’s group. The station claimed that the balls had been heated and cooled so that Matthäus knew which teams he was selecting as he placed Italy in a daunting group with the United States, the Czech Republic and Ghana.

“The Italians are mad if they think that,” Matthäus said at the time. “That is utter nonsense.”

Considering that Italy won the World Cup that year, Matthäus had a point.

Of course, soccer’s world governing body, known by its acronym FIFA, steadfastly denies that high jinks are involved. Outside experts say there is no proof that the process is illusory.

“We are not David Copperfield, and Siegfried and Roy,” Guido Tognoni, a former spokesman for FIFA, said in Las Vegas at the draw for the 1994 World Cup.

Yet conspiracy theories abound. In 2005, the issue was part of a final exam in a cryptology course at the University of Virginia.

Part of the suspicion comes because soccer is a global sport that evokes national passions, said Mike Woitalla, the executive editor of Soccer America magazine.

Americans do not usually root as a nation in a sporting sense, cheering instead for our alma maters and local professional sports teams. The Olympics are an exception, and the Super Bowl draws more interest in the commercials than the game. But much of the rest of the world reaches a fever pitch over soccer.

“In America, you might have fans from Boston thinking they were robbed by a bad call, but in soccer it’s an entire country feeling that somebody treated them unfairly,” Woitalla said. “It’s a fan’s feelings multiplied by millions.”

Conspiracy theories regarding soccer are likely to flourish readily in countries where authorities and elites have often failed the public, said Andrei Markovits, a professor of politics and German studies at the University of Michigan.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a much greater notion of conspiracy in countries like Argentina, Italy and Greece and much less in places like Sweden, Norway, Britain and Germany,” said Markovits, author of the forthcoming book, “Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture.”

FIFA also has opened itself to charges of deception by arbitrarily changing the rules of the draw from one World Cup to the next. One time, performances in the two most recent World Cups are given priority in seeding teams. Another time, it is the three most recent World Cups that count. International rankings wax and wane in importance. Next time, who knows, the standard might be appearances on “Dancing with the Stars.”

And it does not help matters that Friday’s draw comes amid a sprawling match-fixing scandal involving club teams in Europe and soccer officials.

“I hate conspiracy theories,” Markovits said. “They’re an easy way out for people seeking explanations for complex things. That said, I don’t think the draw is rigged, but I’m less likely to completely dismiss it as a crackpot simplification than I would have been three weeks ago.”

In truth, the World Cup draw is not as entirely random as the weekly Powerball lottery. FIFA seeks geographic diversity in each of the eight four-team groups. And it gives the host nation a top seed, believing that local interest is boosted if the host team stays alive. No home team has failed to advance beyond the first round.

For the 2010 World Cup, the host, South Africa, will have a top seed even though it is ranked 86th in the world. Thus it will avoid such powers as Brazil, Germany and Argentina in group play.

“I never thought any of the draws were rigged,” said Bruce Arena, who coached the United States in the 2002 and 2006 World Cups. “The only thing that seems odd to me is how the host country gets decent draws. They never end up in the Group of Death.”

Well, almost never. Arena also coached the United States at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Upon realizing that the opening match was against Argentina, he lamented about American naïveté, saying, “We’re too stupid to fix a draw.”

A Look at the Day After

A week ago, on Thanksgiving Day, customers  actually began lining up as early as 1pm here in Jackson, looking  for the deals…All eyes were on  retail this week as the numbers from the day after Thanksgiving began to trickle in… Some certainly did better than others, as we read in the following report from Time…

Wednesday, Dec. 02, 2009
Winners and Losers from Black Friday Weekend
By Janet Morrissey

Electronics stores, toy retailers and certain teen-oriented apparel companies were big winners over the Black Friday holiday weekend, with door-crashing specials and price discounts attracting much of the traffic and sales, analysts say.

Best Buy, Walmart and Amazon were the shining stars as all three successfully used heavy marketing strategies and doorbuster prices, especially in electronics, to lure shoppers. (See TIME’s 2009 holiday gift guide.)

The losers were largely retailers who a) did not have big electronics offerings, b) did not offer huge Black Friday discounts or c) are not worshipped by teens. Count among them J. Crew, Chico’s and Banana Republic, which offered fewer discounts and saw traffic fall, says Goldman Sachs analyst Michelle Tan, in a note. Pacific Sunwear, Ann Taylor, Talbots and Gap stores were also weak, noted Credit Suisse analyst Paul Lejuez.

Electronics, far and away, was the lightning rod for bargain-hungry shoppers this year both in stores and online. Traffic at Best Buy was “materially bigger” and cash-register ring-ups exceeded last year’s sales, says Barclays Capital senior research analyst Michael Lasser.

Analysts cannot get a complete picture of Black Friday’s success until companies report fourth-quarter earnings early next year. But they closely monitored retailers on Black Friday weekend for shopper traffic and sales action. “The crowds were more significant than last year and they were moving products faster than last year,” Lasser says.

Best Buy’s doorbuster specials drew large Black Friday crowds with customer lines snaking around the block at many of its stores in the wee hours of the morning. Other retailers, such as Staples, Radio Shack, GameStop and hhgregg, also reaped benefits from the electronics frenzy, notes Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter. Many offered sharp discounts on gadgets, ranging from laptops and high-definition TVs to GPS devices and e-readers, as they jockeyed to fill the void left by the demise of Circuit City in the past year. “There is an insatiable hunger for these devices and they make great gifts during the holidays,” says Lasser. (See the 50 best inventions of 2009.)

“The electronics stores all did really well — I think that everybody’s wish list this year has a flat-screen TV,” says Rachel Weingarten, president of Octagon Strategy Group, a retail marketing consultant.

Walmart and Amazon were the wild cards, though, as both challenged electronics retailers on price every step of the way, allowing them to gain market share in the electronics sector. Walmart was especially competitive. “Walmart’s [average] prices were 3.5% below Amazon, 4.2% below Target and down double digits compared to both Kmart and Toys “R” Us,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Adrianne Shapira, in a note. “Walmart left no doubt as to who was the pricing leader.”

One who beat the odds: Macy’s, which “did really well this year and without crazy steep discounts,” notes Weingarten.

Teen-oriented and casual-wear retailers, which had a slow start in November, were among the busiest over the Black Friday weekend. Companies such as Aeropostale, American Eagle Outfitters and Old Navy were big winners, wrote Credit Suisse analyst Lejuez in a research note. Traffic to Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works was also strong, said Kimberly Greenberger, a managing director at Citigroup Global Markets.

But it was the cyberworld that scored the biggest gains this past holiday weekend. Online sales rose 35% on Black Friday and 14% on Cyber Monday from the same periods last year, according to Coremetrics, a Web-marketing firm. The average dollar amount per online order shot up 35% on Black Friday and 38% on Cyber Monday from a year earlier, the firm said.

Amazon scored a huge win from both the surge in cybershoppers and a spike in the number of shoppers cross-checking online prices before purchasing at a bricks-and-mortar store. (Read “Black Friday Sales Were Encouraging, Retailers Say.”)

In a survey conducted by Nielsen, 59% of consumers indicated they planned to shop at least once at Amazon during the holiday season, says Ken Cassar, a Nielsen analyst.”

An anomaly in all of this was luxury-jewelry retailer Tiffany, whose traffic was up year-over-year, although many of its sales were on lower-end silver items, says Joseph Feldman, managing director and retail analyst at Telsey Advisory Group.

Higher-end department stores such as Saks, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus saw decent traffic even though they didn’t offer discounts that exceeded 70% as they did last year. “Inventories are much tighter and promotions much more reasonable, which should lead to good margins,” says Balter.

Analysts caution that the winners on Black Friday will not necessarily be the champions on Dec. 31. Tom Stemberg, former CEO and founder of Staples, and now managing partner of the Highland Consumer Fund, sees no correlation between Black Friday sales and a retailer’s ultimate success or failure over the holiday season. “Black Friday sales are about as meaningful as Groundhog Day is to the weather forecast,” says Stemberg. “What happens is every retailer blows his brains out with these door-crasher deals trying to generate traffic.”

In theory, he says, doorbuster sales are designed to lure shoppers into a store, where they’ll buy other items. In reality though, “the guy who shows up at 4 o’clock in the morning to get your door-crashers is way too busy racing to another store that has a door-crasher that’s starting at 6 o’clock and they want to get in line,” he says. “It’s nuts.”

Read a brief history of Black Friday.

See pictures of people shopping on Black Friday.

Plan For Afghanistan

President Obama traveled to West Point New York Tuesday evening to address his plan for Afghanistan. Here is the story from The Guardian…

Ewen MacAskill in Washington

guardian.co.uk,

Tuesday 1 December 2009 22.11 GMT

President Barack Obama says he will send 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan by the summer but will begin bringing forces home by July 2011 Link to this video

Barack Obama is to set an ambitious timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, with the first troops pulling out by July 2011. The announcement is aimed at countering US public fears that the country is being sucked into a Vietnam-style morass.

Reflecting the increased sense of urgency, Obama is to speed deployment of an extra 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan within the next six months – a much faster timetable than the 12 to 18 months that had been briefed by US officials up until today.

The 30,000 figure is lower than requested by the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, but the Obama administration is hoping that other Nato countries will make up the difference. A senior administration official said the Nato secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, will announce the deployment of extra troops on Friday.

The additional US forces are intended to counter Taliban expansion and help the Afghan army and police take over responsibility for security faster.

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, spoke today of “an accelerated timetable”. During a round of television interviews he said the faster the US forces move in, the faster they will move out. “We can’t be there forever,” he said.

Obama was looking for an “end game” and wanted to “get in there quickly” and transfer responsibility for security to the Afghan military as rapidly as possible, Gibbs said. An administration official said the US aimed to begin winding down troop numbers in July 2011.

Gibbs indicated that there would be no further escalations beyond the one Obama approved on Sunday. Asked on Good Morning America if this would be the last order for extra troops, he said: “The president sure believes so.”

US officials said Obama wants almost all the US troops out before the end of his first term in office in January 2013, leaving behind a small contingency force. Gibbs said the president did not want to leave the problem to his successor.

The new strategy comes at the end of three months of intensive debate in Washington over the future of Afghanistan, an issue that has swamped the rest of Obama’s agenda. The president, in the biggest decision of his term so far, had to choose between options ranging from sending only a few thousand more troops to the 40,000 requested by McChrystal. The president was set to expand on the thinking behind the new strategy in a speech last night at the US military academy at West Point, New York state.

The risk for Obama is that the extra 30,000 troops may not be enough to counter an increasingly confident Taliban and that the timetable for training the Afghan army and police is over-optimistic.

Two brigades, one from the US marines and one from the army, plus reserves, amounting to 30,000, are to be sent to Afghanistan over the next six months, bringing American troops in the country to 100,000. They are to be based in the south and east, where US and British forces are under pressure and badly in need of reinforcements. The first of the marines are due to arrive before Christmas.

Britain has already committed to sending more troops. Extra troops for Afghanistan will be on the agenda at a Nato meeting scheduled for next week.

There are 95,000 Afghan troops at present and the US wants that number up to 134,000 by October 2010, three years earlier than originally envisaged, and then to 240,000 by 2013. There are about 92,000 Afghan police and the US target is 160,000 by 2013.

There is scepticism about whether the Afghan army and police can be trained up that quickly to take over. At present, the Afghan army has a loss rate of about 25% of its members trained by US and its Nato allies, the bulk of whom just walk away.

Obama, who has already set a timetable for withdrawal of a sizeable chunk of US forces from Iraq by 2011, is keen to shed the label of “war president” and increase his chances of re-election to a second term. Public opinion in the US is steadily turning against the Afghanistan war in the face of mounting American casualties and lack of faith in Hamid Karzai’s government.

Obama spoke to Karzai for an hour late on Monday night to brief him about the new strategy that will include “benchmarks” for the Afghan government not only to train more members of the Afghan army and police but also to take steps to tackle government corruption.

Obama’s speech is to be followed by appearances at Congress by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Michael Mullen.

Congressional Retirement

After more than twenty years of serving in Congress, John Tanner is calling it quits… Here’s the story from Metro: Source News…

U.S. Representative John Tanner released a statement last night confirming that he will retire at the end of his current term.  The eleven-term Blue Dog Democrat said he considered retiring in 2007 but wanted to ensure an American was elected president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly while at war in Afghanistan.  Tanner’s seat representing northwest Tennessee, including Jackson and Clarksville, has long been coveted by the GOP.  Jackson farmer and gospel singer Stephen Fincher, a Republican, has already raised 300-thousand-dollars in his campaign for Tanner’s seat.