WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Tuesday that a “mix of human and systemic failures” allowed a Nigerian student purportedly carrying an explosive to board an airplane on Christmas Day, and Obama vowed to quickly fix flaws that could have doomed a flight carrying nearly 300 passengers and crew members.
The president and his top advisers now believe that there is “some linkage” with al-Qaida, and the administration is “increasingly confident” that the terrorist group worked with suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to secure the deadly chemical mixture that he took aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253, a senior administration official said Tuesday.
Details of what the president learned before making his statement were unclear. However, two officials said the government had intelligence from Yemen before Christmas that leaders of a branch of al-Qaida there were talking about “a Nigerian” be-ing prepared for a terrorist attack. While the intelligence did not involve a name, officials said, it would have been evident had the intelligence been compared with information about Abdulmutallab.
As the Obama administration reviewed the government’s actions Tuesday, investigators in Yemen visited an Arabic language institute attended by Abdulmutallab and asked about his ties to a mosque in the capital’s historic section.
In the United States, FBI agents conducted fresh interviews of each passenger on the Detroit-bound flight and focused their attention on Abdulmutallab’s past six months, a time when investigators suspect that the Nigerian student grew increasingly radicalized, according to two federal officials who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to interfere with the ongoing investigation.
Over the past year, Abdulmutallab intensified electronic communications with the extremist Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the federal sources said. Al-Awlaki also corresponded with the Army major accused of responsibility for the Fort Hood massacre last month, officials have said.
From his vacation spot in Hawaii, the president blamed lapses in sharing information after Abdulmutallab’s father alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria last month about his son, who had embraced radical views and cut off ties to the prosperous family. Government officials said they already have identified faulty systems and failures to follow procedure, and Obama has demanded preliminary results of a review by Thursday.
“It now appears that, weeks ago, this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect’s name on a no-fly list,” Obama said, adding, “Had this critical information been shared ... the suspect would have never been allowed to board that plane for America.”
The president added later, “A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable.”
Obama’s stark remarks came two days after Obama’s homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, said that information provided by the suspect’s father before the failed bombing plot was so vague that it did not merit further investigation. Napolitano alsosaid that “the system worked” in this incident, drawing a political outcry from GOP lawmakers and national security experts.
Intelligence officials said they were eager to improve their system to close whatever gaps the Abdulmutallab casemay have exposed. But several expressed puzzlement and some irritation over Obama’s reference to “bits of information available within the intelligence community” that, if “pieced together,” might have “triggered red flag” about the Nigerian.
“Abdulmutallab’s father didn’t say his son was a terrorist” when he visited the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, “let alone planning an attack. Not at all,” one U.S. intelligence official said. “I’m not aware of some magic piece of intelligence that suddenly would have flagged this guy - whose name nobody even had until November - as a killer en route to America, let alone something that anybody withheld.”
The “bits of information” apparently referred at least in part to Abdulmutallab’s two previous visits to the United States - to the Washington area in the summer of 2004, and to Houston for what officials said was a “religious conference” in August 2008. Although those travels, and Abdulmutallab’s U.S. entry visas, were available on separate databases, they had not been given any terrorism significance and thus were not included in the terrorism database maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. Under existing guidelines, the center’s officials would have had no reason to seek out nonterrorism information about him on the basis of his father’s concerns.
Officials said that their reviews in response to Obama’s order will be twofold. Obama has said he wants by Thursday everything the U.S. government has found out about Abdulmutallab from its own data and from foreign governments since Christmas Day, as well as exactly what the suspect did during his previous visits to this country and elsewhere, including Yemen, and whom he associated with.
What is expected to be a longer review, led by John Brennan, the White House deputy national security adviser and counterterrorism chief, will look at whether changes are needed in the database and watch-list systems that failed to flag Abdulmutallab as an imminent security risk and to place him on an airline watch list.
Abdulmutallab’s father had spoken to the CIA in Nigeria in November, the agency said Tuesday, when he sought help in finding his son.
The CIA “did not have [Abdulmutallab’s] name before then,” spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.
“Also in November,” Gimigliano said, “we worked with the embassy to ensure he was in the government’s terrorist database - including mention of his possible extremist connections in Yemen” that were mentioned by his father.
“We also forwarded key biographical information about him to the National Counterterrorism Center. This agency,like others in our government, is reviewing all data to which it had access - not just what we ourselves may have collected - to determine if more could have been done to stop Abdulmutallab,” Gimigliano said.
Frances Fragos Townsend, assistant to President George W. Bush for homeland security, said, “Undoubtedly we’re going to find there was additional information in the system that no one understood until after the event. Clearly people needed to be more aggressive ... to ask additional questions.”
Senior U.S. officials told The Associated Press that intelligence authorities are now looking at conversations between Abdulmutallab and at least one al-Qaida member. They did not say how these communications took place - by Internet, cell phone or another method.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the conversations were vague or coded, but the intelligence community believes that, in hindsight, the communications may have been referring to the Detroit attack. One official said a link between the suspect’s planning and al-Qaida’s goals was becoming more clear.
Intelligence officials would not confirm whether those conversations involved al-Awlaki, the Yemen-based radical cleric, but other U.S. government officials said there were initial indications that he was involved.
Among the areas of ongoing interest for investigators are Abdulmutallab’s purported contacts with clerics in Yemen, including his visits to a popular radical Web site operated by al-Awlaki. Al-Awlaki once preached at a large Northern Virginia mosque attended by three of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers and has exhorted his followers in recent years to engage in jihad.
Information for this article was contributed by Carrie Johnson, Karen DeYoung, Anne E. Kornblut, Michael D. Shear, Julie Tate and Sudarsan Raghavan of The Washington Post; by Philip Elliott, Lolita C. Baldor, Audrey McAvoy and Eileen Sullivan of The Associated Press; and by Peter Baker and Carl Hulse of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/30/2009