The most significant portion of President Obama’s remarks today about his Northwest Airlines Flight 253 reviews is his explanation of what went wrong:
The bottom line is this: the U.S. government had sufficient information to uncover this plot and to potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community
President Obama is scheduled to meet on Tuesday afternoon with 20 of his security advisers to receive the results of two inquiries into how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck a bomb onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. One of those advisers is Michael Leiter, the Bush-appointed director of the More…
President Obama is scheduled to meet this afternoon at the White House with his top security advisers to get the results of their inquiries into the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed Christmas attack. It’s an open question whether he’ll learn what Mark Hosenball at Newsweek reports:
Two intelligence
The Associated Press reports:
Counterterrorism officials have moved the names of dozens of people onto the terror watch list and the no-fly list after reviewing a massive government database of suspected terrorists.
An intelligence official says the government scrubbed thousands of names in its database after an attempted bombing
Following up on my earlier post on the FBI’s longstanding problems with putting terror suspects on its terror watchlist, I just got off the phone with FBI spokesman William Carter, who clarified a few things.
Although Carter couldn’t talk specifically about the case of the failed Northwest Airlines More…
While the State Department is fending off questions about why it didn’t revoke Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa and points fingers at the National Counterterrorism Center, it’s worth noting that the FBI last year was told, following an in-depth audit by its inspector general, that it More…
Marc Ambinder, Eli Lake and the tag team of Carol E. Lee and Laura Rozen all report on John Brennan’s compromised role directing the Obama administration’s inquiry into how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab evaded the no-fly list. Not only was Brennan the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center More…
In an appearance on “Democracy Now!” yesterday morning to discuss Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, I made the point that Abdulmutallab’s ability to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 demonstrates a policy failure more than an intelligence failure. By that I meant that the threat information acquired on Abdulmutallab was insufficient to More…
After State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly told reporters yesterday that an interagency process led by the National Counterterrorism Center was responsible for revoking Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa into the U.S. — and not the State Department, which issued the visa — perhaps some pushback was inevitable. Indeed, a U.S. More…
In his press briefing yesterday, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly took a beating over the fact that department bureaucrats didn’t revoke Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa to enter the United States. Kelly, in something of a defensive crouch, said that it was the responsibility of an interagency effort run by More…
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