al Quaida Assessed

American Journalism Center ^ | January 20, 2010 | Sheila Archambault

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al Quaida Assessed

Sheila Archambault, January 20, 2010

As the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack proves, it is integral for the Obama Administration to address the vulnerabilities that continue to exist in the U.S.’s aviation, maritime and border systems, a former government official said.

The good that has come out of the foiled Christmas Day attack is that it helped concentrate the public and administration on the urgency of the threat of terrorism, said Clark Kent Ervin, the director of the homeland security program at the Aspen Institute, at a Cato Institute event analyzing the first year of the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policy.

President Obama was consistent in saying that the intelligence system failed and that there were dots that could have and should have been connected, Ervin said.

These failures were not only clear in hindsight, but also at the time, he added.

Ervin said the National Security Agency possessed intercepted information that a Nigerian was being prepared for attacks in the United States and that at least one, possibly more, intercepts mentioned Umar Farouk, the first two names of the Christmas Day terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Abdulmutallab’s father, a well-respected Nigerian banker, also went to the Embassy in Nigeria and talked to two government agencies, the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency, regarding concerns about “his son and his increasing radicalization” and trip to Yemen, he added.

With this information, coupled with the knowledge that Yemen is a “hot bed of terrorism” and al Quaida’s fixation on aviation, the intelligence community should have been on high alert, but “the intelligence community didn’t conceive of the possibility that al-Quaida would attack the homeland,” which was a failure of imagination, Ervin said....