ABC News, 7 Jan 10: President Obama said “a systemic failure” in the intelligence community was to blame for not uncovering the Christmas Day plane bomb plot but that any failures were ultimately his responsibility.
The Obama administration released a declassified version of its review of the Christmas Day plane bomb plot, which detailed the “human and systemic” failures that allegedly allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a U.S.-bound plane with explosives on Christmas Day and pointed a finger at two key intelligence agencies.
Obama reiterated what he said earlier this week — that the government failed to connect the dots. “Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had,” Obama said.
. . . . The president outlined additional steps he has ordered across multiple government agencies to correct mistakes made in the lead-up to the Christmas Day plot. These directives included quicker and wider distribution of intelligence reports, strengthening the process by which intelligence analysts process and integrate information and strengthening the criteria used to add to terrorist watch lists.
The additional steps, along with the measures put into place immediately after Christmas, will “improve the intelligence community’s ability to collect, share, integrate, analyze and act on intelligence swiftly and effectively,” Obama added.
But the president acknowledged that there is no “foolproof solution” to prevent future attacks. “As we develop new screening technologies and procedures, our adversaries will seek new ways to evade them, as was shown by the Christmas attack,” he said. “In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary.” . . .
. . . . .While the entire intelligence community came under some criticism, the National Counterterrorism Center and the CIA were singled out for considerable scrutiny. “Though all the information was available to all source analysts at the CIA and NCTC prior to the attempted attack, the dots were never connected,” the report read. “As a result, the problem appears to be more about a component failure to connect the dots, rather than a lack of information sharing.” . . . .
Release of the Security Review Conducted After the Failed Christmas Terrorist Attack (White House)
Summary of the security review (pdf)
President’s Directive on corrective actions (pdf)
President’s remarks
Wall Street Journal, 7 Jan 10: Shortly after he tried to bring down flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab became the fourth former head of a British university Islamic Society (ISOC) to have been charged with a serious terrorism offense. This is only the tip of the problem. Shaming as it is, during his time studying at University College London (UCL), Abdulmutallab was in the most conducive environment an Islamic extremist could inhabit outside Waziristan.
It is a situation that has come about despite repeated warnings. And I should know, because I’ve been one of the people trying to do the warning.
The results are often surreal. Just before Christmas, the al Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki was the subject of an airstrike on his Yemen home that killed many al Qaeda operatives. Only last April my organization was trying to explain to London’s City University why he was not a suitable person to address, by video-link, their Islamic Society. Despite already having been known to be spiritual mentor to two of the 9/11 hijackers, he has been advertised as the “distinguished guest” speaker at the U.K.’s Federation of Student Islamic Societies’ (FOSIS) annual dinner in 2003, and at Westminster University in 2006. Awlaki is now thought to be the connection between Abdumutallab and the people who gave him the bomb with which he intended to bring down the Detroit flight.
A year and a half ago the think tank I head in London released “Islam on Campus.” The reasons for commissioning the report struck me as obvious: The list of Muslim students from the U.K. who had become active in Islamist terrorism was substantial and growing. . . .
CNN, 7 Jan 10: More detainees released from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay are returning to terrorist activity, a new classified Pentagon report is expected to say. The report by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency has not been released publicly, but a senior Pentagon official said it will show more former detainees returning to terrorist activity after being released to their home countries. . . .
Deutsche Welle, 7 Jan 10: International intelligence agencies have changed almost beyond recognition over the past 20 years, primarily because of changing threats to national security. As global terrorism becomes the primary concern of most western governments, intelligence services have had to look for new ways to deal with a new enemy.
“It’s not like the Cold War days, when security services faced a very predictable opponent,” Eric Gujer, security expert and journalist at Switzerland’s Neue Zuercher Zeitung newspaper told Deutsche Welle. “Nowadays, intelligence agencies are dealing with an ever-changing landscape. And in that situation it’s impossible to react as effectively as during the Cold War. Back then, you could gradually adapt to face your foe. Those days are over.” . . . .
AFP, 7 Jan 10: Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Shebab fighting for the control of Somalia, or Nigeria’s homegrown sects — radical Islam is taking hold in sub-Saharan Africa, albeit in many varied forms. The groups in question all claim to be inspired by the Taliban or al Qaeda, which carried out its first major operations on African soil — the 1998 simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 people, most of them Africans.
AQIM, commanded from Algeria, operates in the vast Sahel region where it has staged multiple kidnappings, and in some cases killings, of Westerners over the past three years.
Somalia’s Shebab are trying to impose its brand of Shariah law on war-torn Somalia. In recent months, it has multiplied suicide attacks aimed at toppling the United Nations-backed transitional government.
Nigeria, where 12 northern states reintroduced Islamic law in 2000, is in the spotlight after the son of one of the country’s prominent bankers was charged with trying on Dec. 25 to blow up a passenger jet over Detroit.
In July, Boko Haram, a Taliban-inspired sect whose name means “Western education is a sin” and which seeks to unite Muslims under a Caliphate, carried out simultaneous attacks in four northern states. . . . .
CI Centre Course–268: Jihadi Strategies in Africa
