Spy Agencies Failed to Collate Clues on Terror
By
MARK MAZZETTI and
ERIC LIPTON
Published: December 30, 2009
WASHINGTON — The
National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of
Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but American spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.
The electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks, government officials said on Wednesday, but analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November when the father of
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now accused of the attempted bombing, visited the United States Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization.
The father, a wealthy Nigerian businessman named Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cellphone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical.
A family cousin quoted the father as warning officials from the State Department and the
Central Intelligence Agency in Nigeria: “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.”
The cousin said: “They promised to look into it. They didn’t take him seriously.”
The new details help fill in the portrait of an intelligence breakdown in the months before Mr. Abdulmutallab boarded a plane in Amsterdam with the intent of blowing it up before landing in Detroit.
In some ways, the portrait bears a striking resemblance to the failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, despite the billions of dollars spent over the last eight years to improve the intelligence flow and secret communications across the United States’ national security apparatus.
<for the rest of this story>
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31terror.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
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What a sad, sad commentary on how our plethora of security agencies still JUST DO NOT GET IT...old habits seem to be deeply ingrained into their DNA...grrrrr
