More than a week after a 23-year-old Nigerian nearly blew up a Northwest jetliner bound for Detroit, the finger-pointing is still running non-stop with a very low yield.On a political level, the blame game is just insipid.
After all, the incident resulted from a failure of the nation’s new intelligence system.
That system was built under a Republican administration on the advice of a the bipartisan 9/11 commission. It has been operated for the past year by a Democratic administration and it has been overseen by Congresses controlled by each party. Political agendas just aren’t the issue.
Competence is, and the squabbling is obscuring two important failings that merit far more attention.
The first is a persistent failure by individual agencies to act effectively on information.
In the months leading up to the attack, intelligence was dutifully passed along, but there was a lack of action. Now, in the aftermath, the responsible agencies appear focused more on shifting blame than acknowledging their own weaknesses, hardly a formula for success.
The second shortcoming is even more glaring, but has gone nearly unnoticed.
It appears that the National Counterterrorism Center, where intelligence is linked and coordinated, lacks basic technological tools to identify threats.
Senseless as it sounds, the center can’t search the nation’s intelligence databases in a Google-like way. It can’t enter key words into a search engine--say “Nigerian,” “terrorist” and “Yemen”--and find hidden links in the countless bits of data that the intelligence community collects.
So, the warnings that aspiring bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab posed an imminent threat were buried away like unmarked boxes in an overstuffed warehouse.
Events leading up to the Christmas attack expose how the two failings combined to leave the nation vulnerable.
On Nov. 19, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official, told a Central Intelligence Agency officer at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria that his son had become radicalized, gone to Yemen and sent back worrisome text messages.
Despite the obvious threat, no one at the Department of State even bothered to report that the son had a visa allowing him to enter the United States, much less take it away. Instead, embassy officials sent a slim report to the NCTC.
At the center, no one found out about the visa. Nor did the NCTC, with its deficient technology, link the warnings about Mr. Abdulmutallab with communications intercepted in August by the National Security Agency in which al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen discussed a terror plot using a Nigerian.
Somewhere along the way, the CIA put together its own report on Mr. Abdulmutallab. That wasn’t linked to other hints, either.
The center--created in 2004 to see that the failure to connect the dots before Sept. 11, 2001, would not be repeated--simply added Mr. Abdulmutallab to a vast list of a half million people with possible terrorism ties, not to the “no-fly” list that would have grounded him. Or to a list that triggers attention from customs.
Neither the center, nor its parent agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, would discuss these matters of their general procedures with us on the record. But news accounts and interviews find little inclination at any agency to take responsibility.
The Department of State says though it can revoke a visa, that usually happens only after NCTC review, lest another agency’s investigation be exposed. The counter terrorism center figured it was state department’s job to nominate Mr. Abdulmutallab for the no-fly list, not just pass on its information. The implication is that decision-making is so “interagency” and collaborative, no one simply acts.
Meanwhile, security and privacy concerns keep databases separate.
President Barack Obama has said that the failures revealed by the Christmas Day plot are both human and systemic. He’s right, but the 9/11 commission said the same thing.
The question is what he is going to do about it.
The above is an editorial of USA Today.
