Thursday, May 20, 2010
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Leadership (photo: AFP)
Every major intelligence agency in the U.S. government contributed in some way to the blunders that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria to nearly blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day last year.
An investigation into the incident by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence criticized the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI and even the National Counterterrorism Center, which was created in the wake of the intelligence failure leading to the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The CIA was faulted for multiple reasons, from not distributing important reports to certain officials to not searching the right databases to not sharing intelligence with other agencies until after the attack on December 25.
The report criticzed intelligence analysts for focusing on the threats to U.S. interests in Yemen that were posed by the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) rather than AQAP’s threat to the United States itself.
In addition to criticizing the intelligence community, the committee also blamed the State Department for not revoking Abdulmutallab’s visa after his father warned that his son may have joined up with militants in Yemen.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Wide U.S. Failures Helped Airliner Plot, Panel Says (by Scott Shane, New York Times)
Unclassified Executive Summary of the Committee Report on the Attempted Terrorist Attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 252 (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) (pdf)
Comments