Another NORAD scramble and Gilligan's Island?

CNN) -- In the second such incident in three days, fighter jets escorted a diverted commercial flight on Friday after an unruly passenger caused alarm onboard.

The military sent up two F-16s in response to reports of an unruly passenger aboard AirTran Flight 39, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement.

The passenger had become belligerent and refused to leave the restroom, airline spokesman Tad Hutcheson told CNN on Friday. The passenger appeared to be intoxicated, he said.

The flight, bound for San Francisco, California, left Atlanta, Georgia, at 9:48 a.m. ET, according to AirTran's Web site.

NORAD dispatched the fighters at 1:44 p.m. ET, escorting the aircraft to a safe emergency landing in Colorado Springs, Colorado, officials said. The passenger was detained there and FBI agents from Denver, Colorado, were called to question passengers, Hutcheson said.

The other passengers were scheduled to continue their trip at 4:30 p.m. ET, he said.

On Wednesday, NORAD escorted a Hawaii-bound plane back to its origination city of Portland, Oregon, after a passenger gave a flight attendant a note that was interpreted as being threatening, the federal complaint and supporting affidavit said Friday.

The passenger, Joseph Hedlund Johnson, 56, told the FBI he hadn't intended to scare anyone with the note, which began, "I thought I was going to die," and referenced the television show "Gilligan's Island."

Related article:Federal authorities filed a criminal complaint Friday against a 56-year-old man whose scrawled note invoking "Gilligan's Island" led a Hawaiian Airlines pilot to turn around a Maui-bound flight and return Wednesday to Portland, Oregon.

Joseph Hedlund Johnson, of Salem, Oregon, was charged with the federal crime of interference with the performance and duties of a flight crew member or attendant. He is expected to surrender to authorities on Monday.

The crime of interference with the performance and duties of a flight crew member or attendant carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

According to the complaint and a 13-page supporting affidavit, Johnson and his girlfriend, Caroll Ann Miller, boarded Hawaiian Airlines Flight 39 on Wednesday morning bound for Kahului, Hawaii, on the island of Maui.

Once aboard, Johnson became upset because he was not allowed to store his bag under his exit-row seat, according to the affidavit, which was written by an FBI agent after interviewing Johnson, Miller and the flight crew.

About 45 minutes into the flight, Johnson gave a comment card in a sealed envelope to a flight attendant, who opened it, read it and gave it to the lead flight attendant, who then gave it to the captain, it said.

"I thought I was going to die, we were so high up," the card said. "I thought to myself: I hope we don't crash and burn or worse yet landing in the ocean, living through it, only to be eaten by sharks, or worse yet, end up on some place like Gilligan's Island, stranded, or worse yet, be eaten by a tribe of headhunters, speaking of headhunters, why do they just eat outsiders, and not the family members? Strange ... and what if the plane ripped apart in mid-flight and we plumited (sic) to earth, landed on Gilligan's Island and then lived through it, and the only woman there was Mrs. Thurston Howell III? No Mary Anne (my favorite) no Ginger, just Lovey! If it were just her, I think I'd opt for the sharks, maybe the headhunters."

The "Gilligan's Island" references were to a 1960s-vintage CBS television comedy about a charter boat crew and their oddball passengers who become shipwrecked and wind up living together on a tropical island.

The pilot told investigators that, considering Johnson's earlier behavior regarding his bag, he felt threatened by the card and decided -- now about 90 minutes into the flight -- to turn the jet around.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) scrambled two fighter jets to escort the plane back to Portland.

Passengers were told that mechanical problems were to blame and did not learn about the perceived threat until after they arrived back at their starting point.

There, Johnson -- apparently oblivious to his role in the decision to turn around -- was met by FBI agents, who interviewed him, the flight crew and his girlfriend.

Investigators searched the plane, refueled it, and sent it off once again for Hawaii -- minus Johnson and Miller.

Johnson told authorities that he had flown only about four times in his life and that the Maui-bound flight was his first over water; that he had occupied himself first by reading in-flight magazines and then by filling out comment cards provided by the airline. He said he had lifted the phrase for the card "I thought I was going to die" from comedian Mike Myers, the affidavit said.

"Johnson stated that he didn't think anyone would open it during the flight," the affidavit added. "He told me that he thought the card was going to be taken back to an office somewhere, opened, and everyone in the room would 'get a laugh' from it, and that perhaps he'd even get some frequent flyer miles out of it. Johnson stated he didn't intend to scare anyone and he would not have written his name on the card if it was a threat. Johnson stated that he felt bad about what had happened and that he was sorry."

"The safety and security of airline travel is of paramount importance, particularly following the events of Christmas Day," said Acting U.S. Attorney Kent Robinson in a news release referring to the botched December 25 bombing aboard a Northwest Airlines jet. Authorities "will take all necessary steps to assure that air travel is safe, and that standards of conduct for airline passengers are enforced. And everyone who flies should also know that communicating with a flight crew about crashing airplanes will not be viewed as a joke."

Johnson is to surrender Monday to authorities. CNN was unable to contact Johnson or Miller.

Airline Attack Report Released

Washington (CNN) -- The government had sufficient information to have potentially disrupted an al Qaeda plot to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day, but failed to identify Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab as a potential bomber, a White House review of the incident shows.

In the end, the six-page report found, it was the

inability of the intelligence community to "connect the dots" in putting all the pieces of information and analysis together.

"The intelligence fell through the cracks. This happened in more than one organization," Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan told reporters after President Obama spoke Thursday.

Information was gathered on a possible al Qaeda plot , according to the report, between mid-October and late December 2009.

"Though all of the information was available to all-source analysts at the CIA and the NCTC [National Counter Terrorism Center] prior to the attempted attack, the dots were never connected, and as a result, the problem appears to be more a component failure to 'connect the dots,' rather than a lack of information sharing," the report said.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based offshoot of the terrorist network that attacked New York and Washington in 2001, has claimed responsibility for the December 25 plot.

According to the report, U.S. counterterrorism officials had information about AbdulMutallab, al Qaeda threats to Americans "and information about an individual now believed to be Mr. AbdulMutallab and his association with AQAP and its attack planning." But "the dots were never connected" -- not because information wasn't shared among U.S. agencies, but because it was "fragmentary and embedded in a large volume of other data."

Once the threat was discovered, the intelligence community leadership failed to increase resources working on the "full AQAP threat."

The report said the counterterrorism apparatus "failed before December 25 to identify, correlate, and fuse into a coherent story all of the discrete pieces of intelligence" that the U.S. government had in hand about "the emerging terrorist plot." Read the summary of the security review (PDF)

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

Al Qaeda's claims responsibility for CIA bombing

(CNN) -- Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing in Afghanistan last month that killed seven CIA employees and contractors and a Jordanian military officer, according to a statement posted on Islamist Web sites.

Mustafa Abu Yazid, al Qaeda's commander of operations in Afghanistan and its No. 3 man, said the attack avenged the death of Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Taliban in Pakistan who was killed in a missile strike last August, and al Qaeda operatives Saleh al-Somali and Abdullah al-Libi.

The December 30 blast at a U.S. base in Khost, in southeastern Afghanistan, killed seven CIA operatives including two from private security firm Xe, formerly known as Blackwater. The eighth victim was Jordanian Army Capt. Sharif Ali bin Zeid, a cousin of Jordan's King Abdullah II.

A former U.S. intelligence official identified the suicide bomber as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor who acted as a double agent. He was recruited as a counterterrorism intelligence source, according to a senior Jordanian official.

U.S. sources said bin Zeid was the Jordanian operative working closely with al-Balawi, who was from the same hometown as the onetime leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Jordanian and U.S. intelligence agencies apparently believed that al-Balawi had been rehabilitated from his extremist views and were using him to hunt Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2 figure, the former intelligence official said.

CNN: Top intel officer slams work of U.S. spies.

Washington (CNN) -- U.S. spies "can do little but shrug" when commanders ask for the information they need to fight the Taliban insurgency, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan said in a blistering report.

U.S. military intelligence officers in Afghanistan spend too much time focusing on enemy groups and tactics and not enough on trying to understand Afghanistan's culture, people and networks, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn wrote in a report published Monday.

American military intelligence gathering is "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and levels of cooperation among villagers, and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers," Flynn wrote.

His report comes out less than a week after seven CIA officers and a Jordanian intelligence agent were killed by a double agent who set off a suicide bomb inside their base in Afghanistan.

But the report is about military intelligence gathering, not the CIA's work, one of Flynn's co-authors, Marine Capt. Matt Pottinger, told CNN.

"This is primarily about improving intelligence within the Department of Defense," he said via e-mail

"Our timing was independent of the tragic event in Khost Province," he said, referring to the attack that killed the CIA officers.

Flynn co-wrote the report with Pottinger and Paul Batchelor of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency for a Washington think tank, the Center for a New American Security.

Flynn's boss, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, backs the report, a spokesman for U.S. forces there told CNN.

"We support this kind of activity. Gen. McChrystal is looking for ways to make things better," Adm. Greg Smith said.

But Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said it is "a bit irregular" that a report of this kind would come out through a think tank.

"I think it struck everybody a bit curious," he said. "My sense is this was an anomaly and we won't see it again." He said he was not sure Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had seen the report, though he had been provided with a copy on the day of publication.

"The most I will say is that it was an unusual and irregular way to publish a document," Whitman said.

The report said some good work is being done on the ground, and that local intelligence officers "know a great deal about their local Afghan districts." But, the report said, they "are generally too understaffed to gather, store, disseminate and digest" information.

And, critically, they do not have the resources to gather information which could give Americans a better understanding of Afghanistan, such as census data, patrol debriefs, minutes from councils with local farmers and tribal leaders, polling data, translated summaries of radio broadcasts that influence local farmers and the like.

"This vast and underappreciated body of information.... provides... a map for leveraging popular support and marginalizing the insurgency itself," Flynn and his colleagues argue.

As a result, "U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency," they say.

The report claims they cannot answer basic questions unrelated to the military fight against the Taliban, such as: "Is that desert road we're thinking of paving really the most heavily trafficked route? Which mosques and bazaars attract the most people from week to week? Is that local contractor actually implementing the irrigation project we paid him to put into service?"

CNN's Richard Allen Greene, Pam Benson and Mike Mount contributed to this report

NORAD Scrambles F-15s to escort Hawaii bound flight back to Portland

Two F-15 fighter jets intercepted an airliner bound for Hawaii on Wednesday and escorted it back to Portland, Oregon after a passenger caused a "disturbance," the North American Aerospace Defense Command said."

The Hawaiian Air plane was intercepted at about 1:00 pm local time (2100 GMT) after taking off from Portland, NORAD said in a statement.

"Shortly after take-off, a passenger caused a disturbance on the plane and the pilot decided to return the aircraft to Portland," it said.

The fighter aircraft led the plane back to Portland airport at about 1:15 pm and law enforcement officers were investigating the incident, according to the statement, which offered no other details.

NORAD, a joint US-Canada mission, scrambles fighter jets to respond to possible terrorist threats from the air, after the attacks of September 11, 2001 involving hijacked airliners.

Based in the central US state of Colorado, NORAD was created during the Cold War in 1958 to protect North America against air attacks.