WASHINGTON — Lawmakers pressured President Barack Obama to boost the urgency of anti-terrorism efforts as the Netherlands and Nigeria announced they will start using full-body scanners for passengers.
“Too many people have forgotten the horror of Sept. 11,” U.S. Rep. Peter King ofNew York, top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said Wednesday. “We saw how close we were to disaster. We can use this, as the president says, as a teaching moment to go forward.”
Meanwhile, Yemeni forces raided an al-Qaida hideout and set off a gunbattle Wednesday as the government vowed to eliminate the group that claimed it was behind the Christmas bombing attempt on a U.S. jetliner.
Obama will receive preliminary results today on investigations of what he called the “systemic failure” that allowed Umar Farouk Abdul-mutallab, while purportedly carrying explosives, to board a U.S. airliner in Amsterdam last Friday. Abdulmutallab is accused of trying to blow up the plane as it prepared to land in Detroit.
According to a New York Times report, the National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of al-Qaida in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but U.S. spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.
The electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks, government officials said Wednesday, but analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November when Abdulmutallab’s father visited the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization.
The Times account cited interviews with government officials and others who spoke only on the condition that they not be quoted by name.
“The same kind of failures that were there in 9/11 were present in this one,” former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican who led the commission that examined the Sept. 11 attacks, said. “No one is connecting the dots. It’s the same thing all over again, and that’s what is frustrating.”
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The environment in Washington was further charged by a barrage of partisan attacks revolving around whether Obama bears ultimate responsibility for the security lapse, including a statement by former Vice President Dick Cheney that Obama “pretends” that the United States is not at war against terrorists.
A White House official fired back, blaming the Bush administration as having allowed al-Qaida to thrive while it focused on the Iraq war.
Netherlands Interior Minister Guusje Ter Horst announced at a news conference in The Hague on Wednesday plans for installing 15 fullbody scanners for use in U.S.-bound flights.
The plot preparation was “fairly professional” while the execution was “amateurish,” Ter Horst said of the Detroit bombing attempt. “The plane’s fuselage might have ripped if the explosive would have been ignited the right way in an area with an ideal air pressure.”
In Nigeria, officials said scanners will be installed at four international airports next year.
Obama said Tuesday that U.S. intelligence agencies missed “red flags” that could have put Abdulmutallab, 23, on a watch list requiring extra screening at security checkpoints or banning him from flying altogether. Conventional metal detectors don’t pick up the explosives Abdulmutallab was carrying.
Rep. Eric Massa, D-N.Y., a Navy veteran, joined King in calling on Obama to show more urgency in anti-terrorism efforts.
“In the military, we used to call it a command direction,” Massa said. “The commanding officer has to stand up and say, ‘This is where we are going.’”
Several committees in the House and Senate plan hearings on the attempted attack.
“We have to fully investigate this incident to find accountability for the breakdown in security procedures,” Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said in a statement. He said the aviation panel of the Senate Commerce Committee will hold hearings on the terrorist plot.
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., a member of the commission that examined the 9/11 attacks, said in an e-mail that there should be “zero tolerance for mistakes of this kind.”
Former Federal Aviation Administration security chief Billie Vincent said intelligence agencies missed similar signals before the attacks in 2001.
“It’s analogous,” Vincent said. “We had the data. It didn’t get to the right people. Here we reorganized the system after 9/11 and the system is still broken.”
Airline security and intelligence were overhauled after Sept. 11, 2001, including creation of the Department of Homeland Security to improve intelligence-gathering and the Transportation Security Administration to take over passenger screening at airports.
Richard Ben-Veniste, a former prosecutor and Democratic member of the 9/11 commission, said, “There has been significant improvement since our report, but obviously, and very pointedly, we have more work to do.”
A new outside group of nonpartisan experts without vested interests should be created to look at what went wrong this time, said Frances Fragos Townsend, homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush.
The National Counterterrorism Center, created after 9/11, “clearly didn’t connect these dots,” Townsend said. “We need to understand how that’s possible.”
A number of government commissions since the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, have called for increased passenger screening for explosives.
Two decades later, machines that can detect explosives are in use at 19 U.S. airports, most of the time only as a secondary check on selected passengers, according to the Transportation Security Administration. In 2007, the Government Accountability Office said its investigators smuggled liquid explosivesand detonators past airport security screeners.
Wednesday’s fighting in western Yemen took place in an al-Qaida stronghold. The area is a haven for a group that attacked the U.S. Embassy in 2008, killing 10 Yemeni guards and four civilians. A Yemeni government statement said at least one suspected militant was arrested during the clashes.
Al-Qaida-in-the-Arabian-Peninsula, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s group, claimed it was behind the attempt to bomb the Detroitbound airliner.
U.S. investigators said Abdulmutallab told them he received training and instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. Yemen’s government has said Abdulmutallab spent two periods in the country, from 2004 to 2005 and from August to December of this year, just before the attempted attack.
Wednesday’s clashes took place in Hudaydah province, an al-Qaida stronghold along the Red Sea coast. A security official said the target was a house owned by an al-Qaida sympathizer. The official said the owner was arrested, a suspected al-Qaida member was injured and several militants who fled were being pursued. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Before Wednesday’s clashes, Yemeni forces backed by U.S. intelligence carried out two major strikes against al-Qaida hide-outs this month, reportedly killing more than 60 militants.
Meanwhile, officials said Wednesday that a man tried to board a commercial airliner in the Somali capital of Mogadishu last month carrying powdered chemicals, liquid and a syringe in a case bearing similarities to the Detroit airliner plot.
The Somali man, whose name has not been released, was arrested by African Union peacekeeping troops before the Nov. 13 Daallo Airlines flight took off. It had been scheduled to travel from Mogadishu to the northern Somali city of Hargeisa, then to Djibouti and Dubai.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said U.S. investigators are working with Somali authorities, and linking the case to the Christmas attack “would be speculative at this point.” Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan D. Salant, Catherine Dodge, Angela Greiling Keane, Martijn van der Starre and Jurjen van de Pol of Bloomberg News, by Ahmed Al-Haj, Donna Abu-Nasr, Adam Schreck, Mohamed Olad Hassan, Katharine Houreld and Jason Straziuso of The Associated Press and by Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lipton of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/31/2009