Was Janet Napolitano, knowingly or not, correct when she said the system worked?

On January 27th, 2010, Nathan Hurst reported the following in a Detroit News piece titled, ‘Terror suspect kept visa to avoid tipping off larger investigation‘:

The State Department didn’t revoke the visa of foiled terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because federal counterterrorism officials had begged off revocation, a top State Department official revealed Wednesday.

Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, said Abdulmutallab’s visa wasn’t taken away because intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist over concerns that a denial would’ve foiled a larger investigation into al-Qaida threats against the United States.

“Revocation action would’ve disclosed what they were doing,” Kennedy said in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with, “rather than simply knocking out one solider in that effort.”

Why was/is this not headline news? Not a single major or minor news outlet other than the Detroit News published the information.

Homeland Security Today has much more:

The public disclosures that individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism are knowingly allowed into the US first emerged in response to questioning by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich) during the public portion of the January 20 Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing, “Intelligence Reform: The Lessons and Implications of the Christmas Day Attack.”

Leiter told the committee “that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another.”

Then, on Wednesday, Patrick Kennedy, Under Secretary of State for Management, expanded on Leiter’s revelation during his appearance before the House Committee on Homeland Security hearing, “Flight 253: Learning Lessons from an Averted Tragedy.”

Expanding on what Leiter disclosed last week, Kennedy, while responding to House HS Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson’s (D-Miss.) questions about when and how the State Department revokes US visas of persons suspected or known of involvement in terrorism, stated that the department doesn’t just “unilaterally” revoke the visas of an individual because the person may be the subject of an important CT intelligence gathering operation.

At the behest of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies, Kennedy explained in rather surprising detail, the department sometimes is asked to not revoke, and/or to provide visas to suspected or known terrorists in order to allow them into the United States so that their activities here can be monitored.

Kennedy explained: “We had a request from a law enforcement agency to not, revoke the visa [of a person suspected of terrorist activities]” that the Department had “come across information” indicating “this is a dangerous person. We were ready to revoke the visa,” but “we then went to the [intelligence] community and said, ‘should we revoke this visa?’ And one of the [IC] members said, ‘please, do not revoke this visa. We have eyes on this person. We are following this person who has the visa for the purpose of trying to roll up an entire network, not just stop one person.’”

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