No-fly list expanded since Christmas attack, officials tell Senate
The directors of national intelligence and the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), along with the secretary of homeland security, took responsibility at a Senate hearing Wednesday for the gaps that allowed the Christmas Day bombing attempt on Northwest Flight 253 to go forward.
US authorities failed to place Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on a no-fly list or a screening list to prevent him from boarding a US-bound flight, although ample information was available on him to do so, the officials conceded.
NCTC Director Michael Leiter explained to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that Abdulmutallab's ability to board the plane in Amsterdam resulted from a failure to integrate intelligence information.
"It was not a failure to share intelligence. Instead, it was a failure to connect, integrate and fully understand the intelligence that we had collected," Leiter stated.
"Although NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the intelligence community have long warned about the threat posed by Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, as I did in the fall before this committee, we did not correlate the specific information that would have identified Abdulmutallab and kept him off that flight on Christmas Day," he elaborated.
The NCTC listed Abdulmutallab in its general database, known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) but did not elevate him to smaller watchlists for secondary screening or for barring him from US-bound flights altogether, despite reports to the US Embassy in Nigeria from the suspect's father that he had become radicalized.
Moreover, US intelligence agents lack the capability to conduct a search across all of the diverse information held in US databases in order to correlate information on specific individuals, Leiter confirmed. Providing intelligence agents with the capability to search across databases, as the general public might across the Internet with Google, is a top priority, he added.
Leiter and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair accepted responsibility for the failure to properly integrate the information.
"The overall counterterrorism system did not do its job," Blair told senators. "It's in large part my responsibility. I told the president that I and the other leaders of the intelligence community are determined to do better in the future."
Blair indicated that a bureaucratic process dependent heavily on legal details had directed placement of suspects on the US no-fly list up until Christmas Day, in part due to political pressures to make the list as brief as possible.
That process has been corrected, and the US intelligence community has expanded the no-fly list proactively since Abdulmutallab threatened Flight 253, Blair said.
In addition, intelligence operatives will now follow up on specific pieces of intelligence information in an effort to improve their agencies' ability "to connect the dots," Blair vowed.
With these changes will come a greater focus on threats such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is reported to have trained Abdulmutallab in the use of the explosive involved in his attack, Blair added.
"These improvements that I'm making are not years in the making. We are working on them now. We've already made improvements in the two weeks since that attack. We have a press on them for getting short-term ones done immediately," Blair stated.
Intelligence consumer
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) remains largely a consumer of intelligence products such as terrorist watchlists, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told the committee.
"DHS is and can be characterized as a consumer of the United States government's consolidated terrorist watch list, which we use to help keep potential terrorists from boarding flights and to identify travelers who should undergo additional screening," the secretary said.
DHS does not screen individuals in foreign airports, she stressed, although it can strike agreements with foreign governments to put air passengers through enhanced screening.
Napolitano has arrived in Spain today to begin meetings with international counterparts to expand such agreements to boost aviation screening.
The secretary acknowledged that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the DHS agency currently responsible for vetting international air passengers, flagged Adbulmutallab for additional questioning while he was on his flight.
In addition to the no-fly and selectee lists, CBP examines information that may lead to the questioning of a passenger once he or she lands in the United States, Napolitano explained.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the committee, noted that CBP does not receive complete information on US-bound passengers until they check in at their departure point.
Officials at the National Targeting Center then conduct an in-depth analysis of the passengers to determine if any of them pose threats by matching them to various other information, such as that contained in the TIDE database, Lieberman noted. But CBP does not receive that information in time to prevent a person of interest from boarding a flight.
But Leiter and Napolitano emphasized that the no-fly list has been greatly expanded since the Christmas Day attack.
Napolitano said Abudlmutallab would have been subject to extra scrutiny in Amsterdam if current vetting systems were in place.
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