05 January 2010

Intelligence Not Fully Analyzed Before Airline Attack, Obama Says

After meeting with his national security team, President Obama ordered reviews of airline screening and watch-list procedures.

By Stephen Kaufman
Staff Writer

Washington — President Obama says a Nigerian man affiliated with al-Qaida in the Arabia Peninsula was able to board a U.S.-bound flight with explosives on December 25, 2009, because U.S. intelligence officials had failed to “connect the dots” of information that could have prevented him from being allowed onto the aircraft.

Speaking at the White House January 5, Obama said the incident shows that “al-Qaida and its extremist allies will stop at nothing in their efforts to kill Americans.” The president added that his administration is “determined not only to thwart those plans but to disrupt, dismantle and defeat their networks once and for all.”

At the same time, “when a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way,” he said. “And it’s my responsibility to find out why and to correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future.”

The president said he has ordered a review of the technology and procedures used in screening passengers who are boarding aircraft, and a separate review on the U.S. terrorist watch-list system which identifies individuals who would require additional scrutiny or who should be prohibited from flying to the United States.

He said U.S. officials had access to enough information before the attack that could have allowed them to disrupt the plot and place the suspected perpetrator, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, on a “no-fly” list.

“In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. The information was there,” Obama said, but it “was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged.”

“That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it,” he added.

The president said that due to the unsettled security situation in Yemen, where the United States and Yemeni forces are confronting violent extremists such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, his administration temporarily will stop transferring detainees from the Guantánamo Bay facility in Cuba to that country.

“But make no mistake. We will close Guantánamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaida,” he said, adding that its existence “was an explicit rationale for the formation of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.”

The president said that in the aftermath of the Christmas Day attack, he has also ordered new airport screening and security measures, additional explosive detection teams and air marshals, and increased security cooperation with U.S. partners and allies.

The U.S. terrorist watch-list system has also been updated, and passengers flying to the United States from countries identified as state sponsors of terrorism and additional countries of interest will be required to undergo enhanced screening at airports.

“As we saw on Christmas, the margin for error is slim, and the consequences of failure can be catastrophic,” Obama said.

P.J. Crowley, the State Department’s assistant secretary for public affairs, told reporters January 5 that the Obama administration is “adjusting the criteria” through which U.S. officials decide when individuals are added to a watch-list and are subject to extra security checks, as well as the no-fly list which prohibits them from boarding flights bound for the United States.

He also said the State Department has been heavily reviewing databases and revoking some U.S. visas it had previously issued. “We revoke visas because of fraudulent information [and] we revoke visas for terrorist information,” Crowley said, adding that the review is a continual process and roughly 1,700 visas have been revoked since the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

DOOR REMAINS OPEN FOR INTERNATIONAL VISITORS

Despite increased security measures, Crowley said the Obama administration continues to welcome visitors from all over the world, and closing off the United States would fail to enhance U.S. security and instead be “counterproductive,” as many visitors come for legitimate purposes such as work, study and tourism.

“We want to have these people come to the United States. It’s in our interest. It’s in our foreign policy interest. This interaction between the American people and people of other countries is actually part of the process by which ultimately we will defeat and mitigate political extremism,” Crowley said.

“So we’re not closing our doors to the United States. Far from it. We welcome people coming to the United States. We’re going to make sure that the process by which people come here and travel here is as safe as it can be,” he said.