Clues on underwear bomb plot more specific than previously disclosed

NY Times:

...

Mr. Obama this month presented his government’s findings on how the plot went undetected. But a detailed review of the episode by The New York Times, including more than two dozen interviews with White House and American intelligence officials and with counterterrorism officials in Europe and Yemen, shows that there were far more warning signs than the administration has acknowledged.

The officials also cited lapses and misjudgments that were not disclosed in the declassified government report released Jan. 7 about what went wrong inside the nation’s counterterrorism network.

In September, for example, a United Nations expert on Al Qaeda warned policy makers in Washington that the type of explosive device used by a Yemeni militant in an assassination attempt in Saudi Arabia could be carried aboard an airliner.

In early November, American intelligence authorities say they learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named “Umar Farouk” — the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — had volunteered for a coming operation.

In late December, more intercepts of Qaeda operatives in Yemen, who had previously focused their attacks in the region, mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were “looking for ways to get somebody out” or “for ways to move people to the West,” one senior administration official said.

And the same day those White House meetings on terrorist activities took place, a Qaeda figure made ominous — and seemingly prescient — threats against the United States.

“We carry prayer beads, and with them we carry a bomb for the enemies of God,” a man describing himself as a Qaeda fighter from Yemen announced in a video released on Al Jazeera satellite television. “The issue is between us and America and its allies, and beware, those who stand in the ranks of America.”

The American intelligence network was clearly listening in Yemen and sharing that information, a sign of progress since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Yet the inability to pull the data together or correctly interpret it produced the “systemic failure” that Mr. Obama has vowed to fix and that Congress will examine in hearings this week.

The criticism of the government’s performance has provoked infighting, with rival agencies privately pointing at one another and some intelligence officials complaining about what they see as a White House attempt to deflect responsibility.

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The analysts are stymied, however, by computer systems that cannot easily search automatically — and repeatedly — for possible links, officials said. Even simple keyword searches are a challenge, according to a 2008 report by investigators for the House Committee on Science and Technology.

“The program not only can’t connect the dots, it can’t find the dots,” Representative Brad Miller, Democrat of North Carolina and chairman of a House panel that oversees the program, said at the time.

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There is much more.

The intercept giving the first two names of the bomber was a key piece of information, that if tied with his father's warning could have led to his arrest before he got on the plane. The story does not say why the two pieces of information were not reconciled before the Christmas attempt. We did know that something was planed for Christmas, but there was not change in the alert either.

I repeat myself, but they need to hire Google or some other search firm to make their data searches more sensitive and effective.

Sine the attempt, Yemen has stepped up its operations against al Qaeda in Yemen leaving them little time to plot and practice, but that assumes the next bombers are not already in motion.