Official says human error, not intelligence battles, allowed bomb attempt

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s leading counterterrorism adviser said Sunday that human error, not turf
battles among federal intelligence officials, allowed an
al-Qaida-trained operative to carry out an attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound passenger plane on Christmas Day.

Deputy national security adviser John O. Brennan,
in appearances on several morning television news programs, also said
there was “no smoking gun” of intelligence gathered by American
officials that would have directly suggested that the Flight 253
attack, allegedly carried out by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was
imminent.

“There was no piece of intelligence that said, ‘This
guy’s a terrorist. He’s going to get on a plane,'” Brennan said. Later,
he added: “It was the failure to integrate and piece together those
bits and pieces of information.”

Brennan is leading the Obama-ordered review of
intelligence-gathering and watch-listing efforts, which failed to block
Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, from boarding the plane despite several red
flags known to U.S. officials — including a personal warning from
Abdulmutallab’s father that the young man was displaying extremist
tendencies.

Brennan said the review had so far yielded no
evidence that various agencies withheld that intelligence from one
another, as was the case with rival agencies in the lead-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“There is no indication whatsoever that any agency
or department was not trying to share information” on Abdulmutallab,
Brennan said. There were “some lapses. There was some human error.”

Brennan defended the sophistication of the
government’s anti-terror system after one interviewer questioned
whether it could stack up to Facebook, the popular Internet social networking site.

More broadly, he defended the Obama administration’s
anti-terror efforts, including its decision to charge Abdulmutallab in
criminal court and its plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. He said Obama still would consider returning ex-Guantanamo prisoners to Yemen. About 90 Yemenis are still held at the facility, he said.

Brennan spoke on “Fox News Sunday,” CNN’s “State of the Union,” ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

In several instances, he was followed by
congressional Republicans who criticized his comments and the
administration’s national security policies.

The top Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri,
said on Fox that he was “very disturbed” that Obama would consider
releasing Guantanamo detainees to any other country, in light of
reports that several al-Qaida leaders in Yemen were former Guantanamo prisoners released during the Bush administration.

“If we don’t stop the practice of releasing Gitmo detainees to Yemen or to other countries … we’re asking for even more trouble,” Bond said.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said Brennan “seems to have a hard time saying (the bombing attempt) was an act of terror.”

“This threat is real,” DeMint said on CNN, “and we need to make some very real changes.”

Other Republicans were more measured. On CNN, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean,
chairman of the 9/11 Commission, praised Obama’s reaction to the Flight
253 attack. But he said it was clear that until Christmas, the
administration was “distracted” by health care, the economy, global
warming and other issues and not “focused as it should be on terrorism.”

In his interviews, Brennan rebutted one Republican charge repeatedly: former Vice President Dick Cheney’s accusation last week that Obama was “pretending” that the United States was not at war with terrorists.

Cheney was either “willfully mischaracterizing” Obama’s position, Brennan said, or “ignorant of the facts.”

The administration, he says, is “determined to destroy al-Qaida, whether it’s in Pakistan, Afghanistan or in Yemen. We will get there.”

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