John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, appeared yesterday on "Fox News Sunday," CNN's "State of the Union," ABC's "This Week," and NBC's "Meet the Press" to talk about the failed attempt by an Al Qaeda trained Nigerian to blow a hole through a Northwest Airlines plane landing in Detroit on Christmas Day. In those appearances, Brennan said that "There is no smoking gun. There was no single piece of intelligence that said, 'this guy is going to get on a plane'."What he did not seem to acknowledge is that, after the 9/11 Commission Report identified various shortcomings in the intelligence community that failed to alert the government to Al Qaeda's plans that resulted in the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Congress acted to change the intelligence community's structure and mindset in order to encourage the sharing of information between agencies to connect the dots.
One change made by Congress post-9/11 was to create the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). According to the NCTC website, its mission is described as follows:
"By law, NCTC serves as the primary organization in the United States Government (USG) for integrating and analyzing all intelligence pertaining to counterterrorism (except for information pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism). NCTC integrates foreign and domestic analysis from across the Intelligence Community (IC) and produces a wide-range of detailed assessments designed to support senior policymakers and other members of the policy, intelligence, law enforcement, defense, homeland security, and foreign affairs communities." http://www.nctc.gov/about_us/about_nctc.html
It was anticipated by the 9/11 Commission and Congress that, since intelligence is gathered by several intelligence agencies throughout the federal government, one central government body should be in charge of gathering, analyzing and integrating the information together to provide actionable and more complete reports for use in preventing, if at all possible, future terrorist attacks on US soil. The NCTC is that central government body, as its website says:
"NCTC implements a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission: “Breaking the older mold of national government organizations, this NCTC should be a center for joint operational planning and joint intelligence, staffed by personnel from the various agencies."
As the President's Counterterrorism advisor, it, therefore, seems strange that John Brennan should go on four national news shows in 2010 (more than five years after the establishment of the NCTC) and say that the government's failure to identify the Underwear Bomber from Nigeria before he got on NW Flight 253 was because there was "no single piece" of information to identify him! As my rough sketch above tries to illustrate, the NCTC is tasked with putting the pieces of information together. They are not charged with looking through a haystack to find one piece of information that says: "Stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, from boarding Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam on Christmas Day."Brennan himself seemed to correctly recognize the root of the problem on Sunday when he said:
"What we need to do as an intelligence community, as a government, is be able to bring those disparate bits and pieces of information together so we prevent Mr. Abdulmutallab from getting on the plane."
As I believe Homer Simpson would say: Duh!!!! That is what the NCTC was required to do!
Here's what Brennan said was known to the US before Christmas Day:
"We had information that came from Mr. Abdulmutallab's father. His name was put into what's called the TIDE record system. [Ed. Note: TIDE is compiled and maintained by NCTC.]
We also had, though, intelligence, snippets of intelligence that came in, that didn't refer directly to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab but had little bits and pieces of information that we now know, in hindsight, related to Mr. Abdulmutallab."
According to other reports, the CIA apparently had information about a Nigerian who might have met with Al Qaeda in Yemen, whose name was in part Umar Farouk. Other agencies may have had information about a planned attack by a Nigerian. There may also be other "snippets of information" that could have been available to NCTC to add to these other puzzle pieces in order to identify this threat before Christmas.
Let's hope that Mr. Brennan, the NCTC and the other intelligence agencies can improve their ability to assemble the puzzle pieces of information more quickly in the future. Sphere: Related Content
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