A failure to share the dots of intelligence

NY Times:

The National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but American spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.

The electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks, government officials said on Wednesday, but analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November when the father of the would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, visited the United States Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization.

The father, a wealthy businessman named Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cellphone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical.

A family cousin quoted the father warning American officials in Nigeria: “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.”

The cousin said: “They promised to look into it. They didn’t take him seriously.”

The new details help fill in the portrait of an intelligence breakdown in the months before Mr. Abdulmutallab boarded a plane in Amsterdam with the intent of blowing it up before landing in Detroit.

In some ways, the portrait bears a striking resemblance to the failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, despite the billions of dollars spent over the last eight years to improve the intelligence flow and secret communications across America’s national security apparatus.

One day after President Obama delivered a blistering indictment of “human and systemic failures” leading up to the foiled attack, the battle to assign blame for these failures escalated on Wednesday.

Some government officials blamed the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, for failing to piece together information about an impending attack.

Others defended the center, saying that analysts there did not have enough information at their disposal to trigger a broad investigation into Mr. Abdulmutallab. They pointed the finger at the Central Intelligence Agency, which in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab — including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen — but did not broadly share the information with other security agencies.

The environment in Washington was further charged by a barrage of partisan attacks revolving around whether Mr. Obama bears ultimate responsibility for the security lapse, including a statement by former Vice President Dick Cheney that Mr. Obama “pretends” that the United States is not at war against terrorists.

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There is more.

What this picture seems to show is that the bipartisan reorganization of intelligence gathering and analysis has not lived up to the ambitions of its proponents.

While this hind site is interesting and is important to the lessons learned process, the more important task for the intelligence community is ferreting out who the 25 to 39 other human bombs are and making sure they get on the no fly list. That should be the highest priority for our intelligence assets.