I didn’t get a substantive response from the National Counterterrorism Center or its director, Michael Leiter, to yesterday’s Senate report singling it out for failure in the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab case. Instead, I got pointed to Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s Wheatena-flavored reply. That might reflect the More…
It’s so dry it borders on passive-aggressive. “Immediately following the attempted attack, Director Blair initiated reviews to identify [intelligence community]-wide shortcomings and potential solutions,” reads a statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, responding to this afternoon’s declassified Senate report on systemic intelligence failures More…
A long-awaited report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the failed bombing attempt aboard Northwest Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab essentially finds that the nation’s premier center for terrorism intelligence didn’t do its job ahead of the Christmastime danger.
“Prior to 12/25,” reads the report, spearheaded by More…
In the wake of the attempted Times Square bombing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is urging Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to include what she considers affiliated extremist groups — the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network — on the State More…
Previous reporting has all indicated to me that the big systemic failure in the Northwest Airlines Flight 253 near-attack concerned the standards for moving someone onto specific terrorism lists like the no-fly list. President Obama has said the watchlisting standards are going to change, but he also said More…
The National Counterterrorism Center is in for a brutal week. Its director, Michael Leiter, faces a battery of Capitol Hill hearings next week on what President Obama has described as a systemic intelligence failure ahead of the failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253. But if lawmakers look beyond More…
Today has been filled with news of National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter taking a vacation during the aftermath of the failed attack on Northwest Flight 253. But not only did President Obama say he couldn’t single any one individual out for failure, his counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, actually stepped More…
A subtle but strategically significant point raised by White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan at his press conference right now: The intelligence community didn’t fully understand that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was looking, for the first time, to strike the U.S. homeland; and that in turn didn’t set anyone’s More…
Karen DeYoung’s Washington Post story today isn’t actually about the 2004 intelligence-community reforms failing to stop the would-be Northwest Airlines Flight 253 bomber, despite its headline. It’s actually about how one approach to implementing the critique President Obama offered Tuesday for why Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was able to get More…
Notwithstanding my own analysis of President Obama’s statement today on the failed underpants bombing, Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, just emailed this statement to reporters:
The Intelligence Community received the President’s message today – we got it, and we are moving forward to meet the new challenges.
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