Free Republic

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...

Today, after a vacationing President Barack Obama conceded that both human and systemic failures of U.S. Intelligence had failed to bar a Nigerian man posing a reported security risk from boarding that Detroit-bound jetliner - a near-''catastrophic" breakdown in security - Obama left the reporters taking his words in Hawaii and went snorkeling. The president was wearing a navy blue suit and white striped shirt with no tie, and spoke only to reporters - unlike a televised appearance sans-tie that he had made the day before. Today, his words seemed sterner. Today, he was acknowledging a troubling breakdown in Intelligence...

HONOLULU — President Obama declared Tuesday that there had been a “systemic failure” of the nation’s security apparatus after being told about more missed signals and uncorrelated intelligence that should have prevented a would-be bomber from boarding a flight for the United States. The president was told during a private briefing on Tuesday morning while vacationing here in Hawaii that the government had a variety of information in its possession before the thwarted bombing that would have been a clear warning sign had it been shared among agencies, a senior official said. Two officials said the government had intelligence from...

(CBS) CBS News has learned that as early as August of 2009 the Central Intelligence Agency was picking up information on a person of interest dubbed "The Nigerian," suspected of meeting with "terrorist elements" in Yemen. Sources tell CBS News "The Nigerian" has now turned out to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. But that connection was not made when Abudulmutallab's father went to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria three months later, on November 19, 2009. It was then he expressed deep concerns to a CIA officer about his son's ties to extremists in Yemen, a hotbed of al Qaeda activity. In...