Air travel security reviews under way after airliner attack

The Obama administration has ordered investigations into the two areas of aviation security — how travelers are placed on watch lists and passengers screened — as critics continued to question how a young man on a watch list with a U.S. visa in his pocket and a powerful explosive hidden on his body was allowed to board a fight from Amsterdam to Detroit. “The investigation will look backwards and figure out if any signs were missed, if any procedures can be changed,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Forbes reports that the White House press office, traveling with President Barack Obama in Hawaii, said early Monday that the president would make a statement from the Kaneoho Marine Base later this morning. White House spokesman Bill Burton did not elaborate.

Billions of dollars have been spent on aviation security since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when commercial airliners were hijacked and used as weapons. Much of that money has gone toward training and equipment that some security experts say could have detected the explosive device the 23-year-old Nigerian man is believed to have hidden on his body on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. “One thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked,” DHS Janet Napolitano said Sunday morning on CNN. “This was one individual, literally, of thousands that fly and thousands of flights every year,” Napolitano said. “And he was stopped before any damage could be done.”

Top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee took issue with Napolitano’s assessment. Airport security “failed in every respect,” Representative Peter King (R-New York) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “It’s not reassuring when the secretary of Homeland Security says the system worked.”

Forbes reports that investigators are piecing together Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s brazen attempt to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on 25 December.. Law enforcement officials say he tucked below his waist a small bag holding his potentially deadly concoction of liquid and powder explosive material. Harold Demuren, the head of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, says Abdulmutallab’s ticket came from a KLM office in Accra, Ghana. Demuren said Monday that Abdulmutallab bought the $2,831 round-trip ticket from Lagos, Nigeria, to Detroit via Amsterdam on 16 December.

Demuren declined to comment about Abdulmutallab’s travels in the days before he boarded his 24 December flight from Lagos to Detroit via Amsterdam, saying FBI agents and Nigerian officials view the