Review of Jet Bomb Plot Shows More Missed Clues - NYTimes.com
This article is by Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti.
The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs; the homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano; and the White House homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, in a recent briefing on the security review of the Christmas Day bombing attempt.
WASHINGTON — Worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday, President Obama met on Dec. 22 with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them.
In a separate White House meeting that day, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day.
Yet in those sessions, government officials never considered or connected links that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seem so evident and indicated that the gathering threat in Yemen would reach into the United States.
Just as lower-level counterterrorism analysts failed to stitch together the pieces of information that would have alerted them to the possibility of a suicide bomber aboard a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas, top national security officials failed to fully appreciate mounting evidence of the dangers beyond the Arabian Peninsula posed by extremists linked to Yemen.
Mr. Obama this month presented his government’s findings on how the plot went undetected. But a detailed review of the episode by The New York Times, including more than two dozen interviews with White House and American intelligence officials and with counterterrorism officials in Europe and Yemen, shows that there were far more warning signs than the administration has acknowledged.
The officials also cited lapses and misjudgments that were not disclosed in the declassified government report released Jan. 7 about what went wrong inside the nation’s counterterrorism network.
In September, for example, a United Nations expert on Al Qaeda warned policy makers in Washington that the type of explosive device used by a Yemeni militant in an assassination attempt in Saudi Arabia could be carried aboard an airliner.
In early November, American intelligence authorities say they learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named “Umar Farouk” — the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — had volunteered for a coming operation.
In late December, more intercepts of Qaeda operatives in Yemen, who had previously focused their attacks in the region, mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were “looking for ways to get somebody out” or “for ways to move people to the West,” one senior administration official said.
And the same day those White House meetings on terrorist activities took place, a Qaeda figure made ominous — and seemingly prescient — threats against the United States.
“We carry prayer beads, and with them we carry a bomb for the enemies of God,” a man describing himself as a Qaeda fighter from Yemen announced in a video released on Al Jazeera satellite television. “The issue is between us and America and its allies, and beware, those who stand in the ranks of America.”
The American intelligence network was clearly listening in Yemen and sharing that information, a sign of progress since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Yet the inability to pull the data together or correctly interpret it produced the “systemic failure” that Mr. Obama has vowed to fix and that Congress will examine in hearings this week.
The criticism of the government’s performance has provoked infighting, with rival agencies privately pointing at one another and some intelligence officials complaining about what they see as a White House attempt to deflect responsibility.
Top White House officials, already warning Americans about the possibility of more Qaeda terrorist plots, say they have little patience for squabbling.
“We had a system in place to capture these nuggets because of the investment we put into the collection system,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview. “We had the ability to map it against a database that was designed specifically to capture that bio data information. We had those pieces in place.
“And we could have brought it together, and we should have brought it together. And that is what upset the president.”
A Growing Threat
The blast that ricocheted last August through the office of Prince Mohammed bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia took only one life — that of the young suicide bomber sent by Al Qaeda in Yemen. But the assassination attempt set off alarms both in the Middle East and in Washington.
From the start of the Obama administration, American officials had been focused on the growing threat in Yemen, where Qaeda operatives from Saudi Arabia and Yemen had recently merged and created a dangerous alliance dubbed Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. |
