“ULTIMATELY, the buck stops with me. When the system fails, it is my responsibility,” president Barack Obama said yesterday on presenting the White House’s preliminary report on the breakdown in coordination among US intelligence services that led to the attempted bombing of a US airliner on Christmas Day.
The most significant findings of the preliminary review are: the US government had sufficient information to have stopped the plot; the intelligence community did not devote sufficient resources to the threat from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); the watchlist system “needs to be strengthened and improved, as evidenced by the failure to add (the Nigerian Umar Farouk) Abdulmutallab to the No Fly watchlist”.
The report also concluded that it is not necessary to reorganise what it calls “the broader counterterrorism community.”
Mr Obama said the US must not “hunker down” behind a siege mentality, and that more effort must be devoted to countering lone al-Qaeda recruits like Abdulmutallab.
Several US intelligence agencies collected information about Abdulmutallab and the AQAP plot.
“Though all of that information was available to all-source analysts at the CIA and the National Counter Terrorism Centre prior to the attempted attack, the dots were never connected,” the report says, “and as a result, the problem appears to be more about a component failure to ‘connect the dots’ than a lack of information sharing.”
In response to the report, Mr Obama ordered the State Department to review its visa-issuing process – Abdulmutallab’s US visa was not cancelled after his father told the CIA he had joined extremists in Yemen.
The president directed the Department of Homeland Security to “aggressively pursue enhanced screening technology” and recommend law enforcement for aviation security – interpreted to mean the presence of air marshals on planes.
The director of national intelligence, the CIA, FBI and several other government agencies have been ordered to improve training, conduct reviews and “prioritise” under the supervision of Mr Obama’s chief advisor on security matters, John Brennan.
The White House national security advisor James Jones earlier predicted that Americans would be “shocked” by the failings of US intelligence services revealed in the report, but the report and Mr Obama’s speech were couched in bureaucratic language more likely to induce boredom than shock.
Meanwhile, the Yemeni deputy prime minister Rashad al Alimi told the BBC that Abdulmutallab met with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.
Awlaki had corresponded with Major Hasan via email before the Fort Hood massacre.
The 9/11 Commission reported that two of the 9/11 hi-jackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, met Awlaki in a mosque in San Diego in 2000 and later in Virginia.
Mr Brennan, president Obama’s ‘terrorism czar,‘ told CNN that “Mr Awlaki is a problem. He’s clearly a part of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He’s not just a cleric. He is in fact trying to instigate terrorism.”
There are unconfirmed reports that Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico of Yemeni parents, may have been killed in a US airstrike in Yemen shortly before Christmas.