chairman of the homeland security committee, also with us this morning, cnn national security contributor frances townsend, former bush homeland security adviser. congressman king, give me some more details of this plot as you know this and the man at the center of the plot whom we haven t heard much information about. soledad i really can t give you all the details. this is an ongoing operation. it was an unmetallic device, i can tell you it involves a number of countries and that at no time did the bomb ever make it on to the plane but as far as even the country it originated from, all of that for various reasons is not being disclosed but it is ongoing, involved sophisticated intelligence and it s something where i don t think the government expected it to be coming out yesterday because it s ongoing and the device is being tested by the fbi, and as you raise the issue about whether or not our current level of detection is enough to be able to find this type of device. t
a threat anymore. u.s. counterterrorism official says the explosive device is similar to the one that was used by the so-called underwear bomber back on christmas day of 2009. only this time, more sophisticated and harder to detect. barbara starr is live at the pentagon this morning. what do we know about the bomb itself and about how this all unfolded? well, very little detail being made public at this point, ashleigh because officials say operations intelligence operations are still ongoing. clearly, pointing to the fact they still feel there are elements of whatever this organization is that was behind this throughout. and they believe it is al qaeda in yemen known as aqap. al qaeda in the arabian peninsula. as for the bomb itself, all the indications are that it was very similar. as you said, to devices used by aqap in both the christmas day underwear bomber and another plot after that to put bombs inside printer cartridges and put them on aircraft bound for the united
the indian ocean and they re concerned about rising water levels, so concerned that they say in 90 years time, by the year 2100, they ll probably be completely undeater. and yet they have managed to get together on friday, ramadan, the end of ramadan, and raise money for pakistan. they raised a million rufia. one dollar buys you 12.75 rufia. so it is about 50$78,500. and this is a country themselves that are experiencing a difficult time, tourism is dow it is rebounng, but it is down. and the broadcasters and the enrtainers and politicians got together and said let s have a help pakistan telethon day and just so magnanimous, the entire country go t togeer to raise money for flood victims and just really heart warming. this was supposed to be a time of servic during the end f ramadan. it looks like they chose to serve. this is a tight the smallest