“Look over there!” said Dick Cheney, and the media dutifully looked as he directed.

If the media hadn’t looked as he directed, they might have figured out the underwear bomber’s attack was Dick Cheney’s fault.

Dick’s administration – yes, the one that Dick was running with George Bush acting as a meat puppet – spent $500 million of your tax dollars on a boondoggle counterterrorism database initiative nicknamed “Railhead” which failed to meet requirements to which it was supposed to perform. Railhead was supposed to screen for terrorist suspects attempting to enter the U.S.

The government even knew on Dick’s watch that Railhead was a debacle; the House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology investigated the project’s technical shortcomings, way back in summer of 2008. You can be certain that problems with Railhead were recognized well before investigation and analysis which developed subsequent diagnostic memos.

But let’s back up to the point of origin. Railhead was launched after 2004, in an effort to create an improved datamining tool which would eventually replace the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), operated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). TIDE was ordered in 2003 by the Bush administration, centralizing data on suspected terrorists from across the intelligence community. After several years, the hastily created and implemented TIDE had exploded in size but not become more effective in the process, yielding far too many “bad” names in the no-fly component.

A handful of different contractors were involved in creating the new Railhead database search tool; Boeing and SRI International have been mentioned most often by various sources. Boeing was apparently responsible for managing the project while the other entities involved contributed content. Numerous complaints about Railhead, from the appearance of conflicts of interest between Boeing and SRI, to the misuse of funds for building a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, and to the inability of the initiative to provide basic contracted deliverables, may have spurred additional oversight by Congress.

The House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology’s research into Railhead revealed that the program could not do basic Boolean searches. This may be Greek to the average non-techie reader; here’s a fairly straightforward explanation by Rep. Brad Miller from the Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight:

The TIDE database does not conduct text based searches like popular search engines, such as Google, for instance. Instead, TIDE relies on Structured Query Language (SQL), a cumbersome and complex computer code that must utilize complicated sentence structures to query the TIDE database. Without a detailed index of the data stored in each table in TIDE, the SQL search engine is blindfolded, unable to locate or identify undocumented data. The current TIDE database is composed of data fields that are presented in 463 separate tables, 295 of which are undocumented.[7] As a result, critical terrorist intelligence in the TIDE system may not be searched at all. [Source, page 2]

The failures are not completely outlined here, but you get the gist; this is what three years and half a billion dollars bought for our national security — a failed project.

But Dick Cheney would have you believe that the Obama administration should have cleaned this up and corrected this mess in less than a year’s time (and one would imagine with little money), in order to prevent the underwear bomber’s attempted attack.

Note this well: the Cheney-era cobbled up system which ran over budget and past its due date, which cannot perform a search even as well as a commercial search engine could do a decade ago, could not match up Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with his father, Dr. Umaru Mutallab after Dr. Mutallab expressed concerns about his son’s intentions.

Abdul, in Arabic, means “servant of God”; any construction of a name including Abdul should also be searched without Abdul. A query for “Abdulmutallab” should also have included occurrences of “Mutallab” for this reason. It’s been suggested that Railhead could not handle this simple rule in queries; if it couldn’t do Boolean searches, it couldn’t do this.

Worse, as their systematic obstruction has demonstrated to date, Republican members of Congress have not supported the administration’s nominees to political appointments, including those in key positions in national security. Which means that Cheney’s peeps believe the Obama administration should already have cleaned up this CheneyCo mess using the very same persons and teams which created the mess to being with.

We’ve seen how this works with the financial industry: it doesn’t.

There was moderately good coverage in 2008 of the problems with Railhead, from Karen DeYoung at The Washington Post to Michael Krigsman at ZDNet. But the public didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the problem, what with the lion’s share of media coverage focusing on the presidential campaigns and on the incipient financial crisis. And while the media did a fair job of recognizing the problem, it did not make this particular national security problem a campaign issue; the media failed to break through to the public’s general awareness.

And now the media exacerbates the situation by giving Dick Cheney a bully pulpit through which he can redirect our attention away from the gross errors of governance committed by the previous administration, when he was calling many of the shots on national security. Cheney says Obama makes us weaker and presto, the media gives his claim oxygen instead of pressing back at Cheney and asking him why he was such a national security fuck-up, leaving Obama’s administration to straighten out both Cheney’s messes while our nation remains exposed to terrorism.