.US investigates security flaws
President Barack Obama will meet intelligence and security agency heads on Tuesday after he returns to Washington, as his administration tries to close the holes in the system that let a would-be terrorist board a flight to the US last week.
After receiving a preliminary report from agency chiefs on Thursday, Mr Obama, who is on holiday in Hawaii, spoke to John Brennan, his counter-terrorism adviser, and Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security.
”I anticipate receiving assessments from several agencies this evening and will review those tonight and over the course of the weekend,” Mr Obama said in a statement.
He said he would on Tuesday also discuss ”security enhancements and intelligence-sharing improvements in our homeland security and counter-terrorism operations”.
The preliminary report is aimed at reassuring a jittery public that the skies are safe and at countering criticism that the Obama administration was too slow to address what the president on Tuesday called ”human and systemic failures” in the intelligence sharing system.
A final report is expected to take weeks but intelligence agencies have already started defending their actions after it emerged that multiple lapses had taken place that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian who allegedly tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Friday, to board the Northwest Airlines flight last Friday.
There have been widespread reports that intelligence agencies had been warned in August of a plot being planned from Yemen that involved a Nigerian man, possibly learning parts of his name. Mr Abdulmutallab’s father later reported concerns about his son to the US embassy in Nigeria on November 19.
The suspect’s father, Umaru Mutallab, former chairman of First Bank, told officials at the US embassy in Nigeria on November 19 that he feared his son could pose a terrorist risk. This led authorities to place the 23-year-old on the 550,000-name Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, but they did not add him to the more restrictive no-fly list or revoke his visa.
Mr Obama suggested that the information was not passed on to the National Counterterrorism Center, a database of suspicious individuals created on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.
”There was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potentially catastrophic breach of security,” said Mr Obama on Tuesday.
”When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been, so that this extremist boards a plane with dangerous explosives that could cost nearly 300 lives, a systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable,” the president said.
Both the CIA and the State Department, which runs consular operations, have defended their actions.
”In November, we worked with the embassy to ensure [Mr Abdulmutallab] was in the government’s terrorist database - including mention of his possible extremist connections in Yemen,” the CIA said in a statement. ”We also forwarded key biographical information about him to the NCTC.”
Republicans have called for the resignation of Ms Napolitano and blame has also been levelled at Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence who oversees the NCTC.
Some have also urged the Obama administration to stop repatriating detainees from the controversial Guantánamo Bay prison camp.
As he seeks to fulfil his pledge to close down the prison camp, Mr Obama’s administration has been sending detainees back to their home countries, including six Yemenis who were repatriated the week before Christmas.
Even before the Christmas day incident, the administration was wary about transferring Yemenis because of concerns about the country’s instability. About 90 of the 198 inmates still in Guantánamo are from Yemen.
Fears increased after a Yemen-based group calling itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said it planned the attack in retaliation for US support of a Yemeni military strike on one of its bases, which killed up to 60 of its members.
Mr Abdulmutallab told investigators he was given explosives by al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen, where he had been studying Arabic.
Some lawmakers, including from the Democratic party, have called for the transfers to be halted while the investigation continues. There have been reports that two former inmates who took refuge in Yemen were behind the botched plot.
As the post-mortem continues in the US, in Holland, Schiphol airport made full body scanners mandatory for US-bound passengers, in a decision that will put pressure on other airports to adopt similar security measures.
Mr Abdulmutallab boarded the aircraft at the Amsterdam airport with 80 grammes of explosives in his undergarments. Experts said that full body scanners, which can detect anything hidden beneath clothing, would have revealed the explosives.
Schiphol is one of a number of airports in Europe and the US to have carried out trials of the scanners, and its move will increase pressure on other European airports to follow suit.
However, privacy campaigners’ concerns about the revealing black-and-white images the equipment produces have been an obstacle to their widespread introduction.
FT
After receiving a preliminary report from agency chiefs on Thursday, Mr Obama, who is on holiday in Hawaii, spoke to John Brennan, his counter-terrorism adviser, and Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security.
”I anticipate receiving assessments from several agencies this evening and will review those tonight and over the course of the weekend,” Mr Obama said in a statement.
He said he would on Tuesday also discuss ”security enhancements and intelligence-sharing improvements in our homeland security and counter-terrorism operations”.
The preliminary report is aimed at reassuring a jittery public that the skies are safe and at countering criticism that the Obama administration was too slow to address what the president on Tuesday called ”human and systemic failures” in the intelligence sharing system.
A final report is expected to take weeks but intelligence agencies have already started defending their actions after it emerged that multiple lapses had taken place that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian who allegedly tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Friday, to board the Northwest Airlines flight last Friday.
There have been widespread reports that intelligence agencies had been warned in August of a plot being planned from Yemen that involved a Nigerian man, possibly learning parts of his name. Mr Abdulmutallab’s father later reported concerns about his son to the US embassy in Nigeria on November 19.
The suspect’s father, Umaru Mutallab, former chairman of First Bank, told officials at the US embassy in Nigeria on November 19 that he feared his son could pose a terrorist risk. This led authorities to place the 23-year-old on the 550,000-name Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, but they did not add him to the more restrictive no-fly list or revoke his visa.
Mr Obama suggested that the information was not passed on to the National Counterterrorism Center, a database of suspicious individuals created on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.
”There was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potentially catastrophic breach of security,” said Mr Obama on Tuesday.
”When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been, so that this extremist boards a plane with dangerous explosives that could cost nearly 300 lives, a systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable,” the president said.
Both the CIA and the State Department, which runs consular operations, have defended their actions.
”In November, we worked with the embassy to ensure [Mr Abdulmutallab] was in the government’s terrorist database - including mention of his possible extremist connections in Yemen,” the CIA said in a statement. ”We also forwarded key biographical information about him to the NCTC.”
Republicans have called for the resignation of Ms Napolitano and blame has also been levelled at Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence who oversees the NCTC.
Some have also urged the Obama administration to stop repatriating detainees from the controversial Guantánamo Bay prison camp.
As he seeks to fulfil his pledge to close down the prison camp, Mr Obama’s administration has been sending detainees back to their home countries, including six Yemenis who were repatriated the week before Christmas.
Even before the Christmas day incident, the administration was wary about transferring Yemenis because of concerns about the country’s instability. About 90 of the 198 inmates still in Guantánamo are from Yemen.
Fears increased after a Yemen-based group calling itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said it planned the attack in retaliation for US support of a Yemeni military strike on one of its bases, which killed up to 60 of its members.
Mr Abdulmutallab told investigators he was given explosives by al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen, where he had been studying Arabic.
Some lawmakers, including from the Democratic party, have called for the transfers to be halted while the investigation continues. There have been reports that two former inmates who took refuge in Yemen were behind the botched plot.
As the post-mortem continues in the US, in Holland, Schiphol airport made full body scanners mandatory for US-bound passengers, in a decision that will put pressure on other airports to adopt similar security measures.
Mr Abdulmutallab boarded the aircraft at the Amsterdam airport with 80 grammes of explosives in his undergarments. Experts said that full body scanners, which can detect anything hidden beneath clothing, would have revealed the explosives.
Schiphol is one of a number of airports in Europe and the US to have carried out trials of the scanners, and its move will increase pressure on other European airports to follow suit.
However, privacy campaigners’ concerns about the revealing black-and-white images the equipment produces have been an obstacle to their widespread introduction.
FT
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