President Obama will receive a report Thursday detailing how some government agencies failed to share or highlight potentially relevant information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, while others were insufficiently aggressive in seeking out what was known about him, administration officials said Wednesday.
Intelligence intercepts from Yemen beginning in early August, when Abdulmutallab arrived in that country, contained "bits and pieces about where he was, what his plans were, what he was telling people his plans were," as well as information about planning by the al-Qaeda branch in Yemen, a senior administration official said. "At first blush, not all these things appear to be related" to the 23-year-old Nigerian and the bombing attempt, he said, "but we believe they were."
Grandpère and I have been talking off and on for several days about the intelligence failures in connection with Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up the plane. But for the quick action of the passengers on the plane, including Jasper Schuringa, who heroically put out the fire with his bare hands, the end of the story would have been tragic and deadly.
At airport security, I have been patted down, wanded, and had my bags searched. If I believed that the procedures at security check-points protected us, I'd be less annoyed each time I fly. The single time that I forgot that I carried mace spray, my purse passed through the x-ray machines without incident. We know that tests of security checkpoints show that on quite a few occasions guns and other dangerous carry-ons have not been detected.
Neither of us has training in gathering intelligence, but both of us think the following information should have triggered enormous red flags.
Among the failures officials initially cited, no agency checked to find out whether Abdulmutallab had a valid visa to enter the United States after his father appeared at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria last month expressing concerns about his disappearance and associations in Yemen. Although electronic intercepts from Yemen indicated that an unnamed Nigerian was being groomed for an al-Qaeda mission, and other communications spoke of plans for a terrorist attack during Christmas, none of this information was flagged in a way that would have linked it to the father's report.
....
Some intelligence officials noted that although the CIA has received much of the public criticism, the NSA is responsible for intercepts. Others argued that the reports on Abdulmutallab's father submitted by diplomatic and CIA personnel at the embassy were written so mildly as to beg to be ignored. "It didn't have a specific recommendation for watch-listing," said an intelligence official whose organization reviewed the report. "It could have."
The blame game starts amongst the agencies responsible. It appears that the follow-up on the father's information was weak to non-existent. That, along with reports that al-Qaeda was preparing a Nigerian for an attack around Christmas, should have set off alarms. The reports on Abdul's father were written weakly? Seems to me that the defense by the agencies for ignoring the information submitted by the father is weak, very weak. And that all of the known intelligence was never gathered together by any of the agencies responsible is quite worrisome.
Has anything changed since September 11?
UPDATE: WATCH CONDI RICE SQUIRM.
A memory jog for Republicans, who are in full attack mode against the Obama administration.
A year ago a friend and I accidentally avoided security altogether in Frankfurt on the way home from Austria and Hungary. And I have a bottle of Hungarian water to prove it.
ReplyDeletePiskie, to avoid security altogether is quite a feat - even accidentally.
ReplyDeleteA couple of months ago I was seeing a friend off at Logan airport. We wandered around looking for a place to sit and talk before he did the security screen and went to his gate. We were about to walk through an open door into a room that seemed to have a lot of empty seats when a man (regular civilian passenger) told us not to enter. Turns out we almost walked through an open, unguarded door to a departure gate.
ReplyDeleteI'll never forget traveling with my sister's in-laws through O'Hare airport. My sister's father in law had had a laryngectomy and uses a speaking apparatus. The security guard took it away from him and then demanded to be told what it was.
Story after story. A small bottle of water that I forgot in my purse went through the x-ray machine, too.
ReplyDeleteIn "What the Dog Saw," Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting article about the nature of intelligence gathering, collation and analysis that puts the issue of so-called security failures into perspective.
ReplyDeleteOften the connection between individual pieces of intelligence can only be grasped with certainty post-facto. Up to that point, it comes down to someone (ideally someone passably bright) simply making an educated guess about whether this collection of facts does or does not represent a real security threat. The big piece we never see is the doubtless thousands of cases where, with facts similar to this case, someone correctly concluded that the risk was low.
Malcolm, it seems to me that just the father's information on his son should have been enough to trigger an investigation into whether Abdul had a visa to travel to the US.
ReplyDeleteWhat particularly annoys me about this (not having set foot in a plane since 1976. day-to-day inconveniences have not impacted much) is that the loony right uses the incident as a hook on which to hang yet more virulent attacks on Obama [off topic - you'd think that by now Google wouldn't still be underlining Obama's surname as a spelling error, wouldn't you? - more institutional right-wing bias, I guess. Not to say that the man is not something of a disappointment].
ReplyDeleteContrast this with the fact that the Bush administration did sod-all in the weeks before 9/11 with the CIA's warning that a major attack was evidently in the offing, and the free pass that "the media" have given them on this appalling lapse (if "lapse" and not deliberate policy is what it was) when this fact became public knowledge.
No, I don't think anything has changed. The apparatus rules, whether incompetent or not.
ReplyDeleteLapin, I added an update to the post with the video of a portion of Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
ReplyDeleteGöran, you're right. Even with new leadership, it's extremely difficult to introduce change into parts of the government bureaucracy.