Questions surface over Times Square investigation

cnn.com
Questions remained in the days following the dramatic arrest of the Times Square bombing suspect, who was captured only minutes before his plane was due to take off for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
Faisal Shahzad was able to board Emirates Flight 202 late Monday despite being put on a no-fly list earlier in the day, but at the time of his ticket purchase, the airline had not refreshed its information so his name did not raise any red flags, a senior counterterrorism official said.
Authorities had tailed Shahzad throughout the day, but lost him before he arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, where he was ultimately arrested, the official said.However, an FBI official responded that surveillance operations are designed with redundancies in place, and that agents had to avoid tipping off Shahzad that he was being followed.
At a Tuesday news conference, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder defended surveillance efforts.

"I was here all yesterday and through much of last night and was aware of the tracking that was going on, and I was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him," Holder said.Rep. Charles Rangel, D-New York, noted that, along with a Nigerian man who tried to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, this is the second high-profile incident in recent memory where someone on the U.S. no-fly list has managed to board a plane."Whatever went wrong, I hope they get their acts together and correct it," Rangel said. "The good thing about this is that nobody was hurt in either case, but ... someone ought to come up with the answer and see that it doesn't happen again."Shahzad was arrested shortly before midnight Monday at JFK airport after U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which reviews all flight manifests, caught his name when the airline sent the agency its passenger list, according to the counterterrorism official.The terror plot may dominate discussions Wednesday as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg travels to Washington for a previously scheduled Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on terrorism.Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine and ranking member of the committee, has already expressed concerns.
"A key question for me is why this suspect was allowed to board the plane in the first place," Collins said, according to the New York Times. "There appears to be a troubling gap between the time they had his name and the time he got on the plane."
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN that U.S. intelligence efforts have to be better.
"Being lucky can't be our national security strategy," Hoekstra said. "We were lucky on Christmas Day. We were lucky last week."