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Failure on Flight 253; We say

IT is eight years, almost to the day, since al-Qaeda fanatic Richard Reid tried to blow up an American Airlines flight to Miami by detonating explosives hidden in his shoes.

In 2006 three men were caught plotting to blow up flights from London to North America using bombs disguised as soft drinks.

So the drama that unfolded on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day has a chilling and highly alarming sense of dj vu about it. An engineering student appears to have smuggled aboard explosives hidden on his body.

He bypassed all airport security despite having only a one-way ticket and being named on a US database as having "a significant terrorist connection".

It is only thanks to the astonishing bravery of passenger Jasper Schuringa and the cabin crew that a terror attack in the skies was thwarted.

A US Replica Gucci Watches Fake Handbags senator was quick to tell reporters that the device used was "sophisticated" and "different from what we have encountered before", as if to explain away this appalling security blunder.

British defence experts have been warning for months that al-Qaeda is obsessively plotting more attacks on the commercial airlines which they see as "soft targets".

Now President Obama has ordered that "all appropriate measures be taken to increase security for air travel".

But doesn't that just beg the question "Why weren't they in place before?" The US Government's "no fly list" contains more than
embroidered patches a million names of people banned from flying in or out of the United States.

And the FBI "monitors" thousands more individuals with suspect links.

So why didn't a big red light start flashing when this 23-year-old man boarded Flight 253 in Amsterdam? President Obama recently committed another 30,000 troops to fight the war against terror on the battlefields of Afghanistan. Now he needs to ask if his security services are letting them down on the home front.