TSA - "Keystone Kops/ Part Deux"

[kbot]

Sometime, you just can't make-up this stuff......

Terrorist Entered Witness Protection, Then Fled the United States

Should you ever be accused of terrorism, here’s what you should do: Snitch on your friends, demand to be placed under witness protection, then fly out of the country. According to a stunning report from the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, this is remarkably easy to do — and it’s actually happened.
Not one, but two suspected terrorists placed in the federal witness security (WITSEC) program have managed to elude the U.S. Marshals Service, even though their status as suspected terrorists meant the should have appeared on federal no-fly lists.
“In July 2012, the USMS stated that it was unable to locate two former WITSEC participants identified as known or suspected terrorists,” according to the Justice Department’s inspector general (.pdf), “and that through its investigative efforts it has concluded that one individual was and the other individual was believed to be residing outside of the United States.”
Neither individual is identified, and it is not clear when they gave the feds the slip. Apparently, only two former terrorists entered witness protection in the last six years. Jake Tapper first reported this for CNN.
This amazing turn of events is part of what the inspector general termed “significant deficiencies” in how known or suspected terrorists are handled after they flip, testify on their former comrades and enter witness protection. The underlying problem is almost laughably absurd: Once the terrorists get new identities, those identities aren’t provided to the Transportation Security Agency for inclusion on the federal No-Fly List.
Accordingly, “it was possible for known or suspected terrorists to fly on commercial airplanes in or over the United States and evade one of the government’s primary means of identifying and tracking terrorists’ movements and actions,” the inspector general writes. Some individuals in witness protection “were on the TSA’s No Fly List yet were allowed to fly on commercial flights with WITSEC Program officials’ knowledge and approval.” This ain’t Henry Hill from Goodfellas pining for properly cooked Italian food after snitching.
The evasion of the No-Fly List for terrorists in witness protection wasn’t considered a problem until the inspector general brought it to the attention of law enforcement and homeland security officials, the report states. Before May 2012, there wasn’t even a process to share witness protection information on terrorists with the FBI. Without informing the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center about new terrorist identities, there’s no way the tracking databases like the No-Fly that feed off the Center’s information can know about them.
According to the inspector general, the Justice Department doesn’t even “definitively know” how many known or suspected terrorists are in witness protection. The public might be surprised to learn that there even is a witness-protection option for terrorist suspects. But the inspector general says its snitches have “provided invaluable and critical information and testimony” in cases ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing to the 2007 attempt to blow up jet fuel tanks at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The Justice Department doesn’t contest the watchdog’s alarming findings about the absconded terrorists. “[W]e agree that the suitability and monitoring requirements historically employed in administering the Program should be enhanced for terrorism-linked witnesses,” Armando Bonilla, a senior counsel to Deputy Attorney General James Cole. Bonilla said that the Marshals Service and the Justice Department Criminal Division’s Office of Enforcement Operations have now disclosed to the FBI and other agencies “the true and new identities and known aliases” of “all identified former known or suspected terrorists admitted into the WitSec Program.”
“The Government generally cannot choose its witnesses,” Bonilla notes.
Nor, apparently, can it always keep track of those witnesses after it gives them protection.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/05 ... rotection/

[Diogenes]

Sadly I am not surprised.