If you will recall the only shock to come out of the report was
Obama semi-shouldering the blame before he turned around and blamed the
intelligence community. Other than that, it all ended up being a dud.
Well, as it turns out that's because the Obama administration apparently covered up redacted all the juicy bits involving the administration's laissez faire attitude towards Islamic terror.
From The New York Times:
Mr. Obama this month presented his government’s findings on how the
plot went undetected. But a detailed review of the episode by The New
York Times, including more than two dozen interviews with White House
and American intelligence officials and with counterterrorism officials
in Europe and Yemen, shows that there were far more warning signs than the administration has acknowledged.
The officials also cited lapses and misjudgments that were not disclosed in the declassified government report released Jan. 7 about what went wrong inside the nation’s counterterrorism network.
Several
high level meetings were held in the White House on December 22 to
discuss the escalating threats and the multiple sources of intelligence
pointing to threats from the Arabian peninsula. Among them:
A warning from the UN Nations that a similar device used in a prior attack in Saudi Arabia could be smuggled onto airplanes.
Multiple phone intercepts mentioning a 'significant event' on Christmas day.
A phone intercept identifying Umar Farouk as a volunteer for a coming operation.
More phone intercepts from al Qaeda in Yemen looking for ways to get people into the west.
An al Jazeera televised warning from an al Qaeda fighter in Yemen on the actual date of the WH meetings.
And most telling of all:
Counterterrorism officials assumed that the militants were not sophisticated or ambitious enough to send operatives into the United States. And no one shifted more intelligence analysts to the task,
so that they could have supported the military assaults by Yemen while
also scrutinizing all incoming tips for hints about future attacks
against Americans, one administration official said. So, though
intelligence analysts had enough information in those days before
Christmas to block the suicide bomber on the Northwest flight, they did not act.
In
my opinion this wasn't so much a failure of intelligence or imagination
as it was a failure of INTEREST on the part of the Obama administration
officials.
Exhibit A
"We have agreements with a number of different countries that work with
us cooperatively on intelligence matters," says the State Department
employee. "A number of the treaties work through our justice
departments or foreign offices or intelligence and interior or homeland
security agencies. Several departments here in Washington got the
information from London and it didn't trigger anything within our own
system.
This employee says that despite statements from the Obama Administration, such information was flagged and given higher priority during the Bush Administration, but that since the changeover "we are encouraged to not create the appearance that we are profiling or targeting Muslims.
I think career employees were uncomfortable with the Bush procedures
and policies and were relieved to not have to live under them any
longer."
Shocking indeed.
