The nation’s top counterterrorism chiefs admitted today what we already knew: They had plenty of clues about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallah’s long-hatched plan to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day but didn’t add them up.Michael Leiter, the Director of the National Terrorism Center (pictured at left), testified to Congress that “Abdulmutallah should not have stepped on that plane. The counterterrorism system failed and I told the president we are determined to do better.”
He had company. This mea culpa, presented to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, was also signed by Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence. Blair conceded that he failed to assign sufficient numbers of intelligence analysts to piece together the different tips that had come in-including the warning from Abdullmutallah’s own father delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and an intercept from terrorists in the Yemen that included the jockstrap bomber’s first name.
I would hope that the president is more than disappointed with these guys. He should be hopping mad. Because, as it turns out, he called a meeting just before Christmas to review intelligence suggesting that an attack was impending.
So the situation in the White House was not unlike that in August 2001, that summer of blissful inattention, when Condoleezza Rice saw an intelligence report that Osama Bin Laden intended to attack the United States but did nothing about it. Except that this time the president, given what is called “the chatter” picked up by our intelligence watchdogs, did want something done about it-heightened vigilance.
Instead, the newly penitent Leiter went on a skiing vacation.
It’s worth calling attention to something that Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at a press conference at the Pentagon last week. This event was, understandably, greatly overshadowed by the earthquake in Haiti.
Gates was talking about the case of Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the army psychiatrist who killed thirteen people at Ford Hood army base in Texas. In this instance there was a protracted failure to pick up many warning signs that Hassan was unstable and had probably been recruited by the same people in Yemen who found and dispatched Abdulmutallah.
This is what Gates said: “In this area, as in so many others, this department is burdened by 20th century processes and attitudes, mostly rooted in the cold war. Our counterintelligence procedures are mostly designed to combat an external threat such as a foreign intelligence service.” (Italics mine).
This is a truly alarming glimpse into the heart of the apparatus that’s supposed to ensure our security. I have great respect for Secretary Gates-he’s got a job that carries enormous responsibility, he’s shown a robust resistance to politicizing that post, and he’s often refreshingly candid. So we should take good note, and do something that the counterterrorism establishment says it failed to do, and connect the dots-connect Gates’s picture of seriously out-dated systems with today’s confession to Congress of missing all the clues to the Christmas Day plot.
We don’t just have a bureaucratic problem-though that is big enough, with counterterrorism responsibilities dispersed through many fiefdoms. We have an obviously obsolete technology trying to match the most dangerous low-tech operators in the world. That’s a fascinating if worrying tension and one quite new to warfare. In order to be on top of our game we need the most nimble and deep-searching surveillance technology, good enough to arrest the progress of a guy who lines his underpants with explosive-or, who arms his rectum. Remember, they began with box cutters and worked backwards from there. Who really understands this?
And do these touching public confessions of failure make us feel more confident of the people making them? Not in my case. Today the clueless Michael Leiter did more to earn my new Kermit Tyler award than he did by enjoying his Christmas vacation.
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