As we learned more about Top Secret America, we sometimes thought Osama bin Laden must have been gloating. There was so much for him to take satisfaction from: the chronic elevation of Homeland Security’s color-coded threat warning, the anxious mood and culture of fear that had taken hold of public discussions about al-Qaeda, the complete contortions the government and media went through every time there was a terrorist bombing overseas or a near-miss at home. We imagined bin Laden and his sidekick, Ayman Zawahiri, pleased most by this uncontrollable American spending spree in the midst of an economic downturn. It was evident from the audiotapes secretly released after 9/11 that they both followed the news and would have known that thousands of people had lost their homes, that many more had lost their jobs, that states were cutting back on health care for poor children and on education just to stay afloat and to allow state fusion centers and mini-homeland security offices everywhere to stay open. They would have known, too, that the major American political parties were tearing themselves apart over how to stop deficit spending and reverse the economic free fall, and that they still feared al-Qaeda as a threat more frightening than the Soviet superpower of the cold war.
And this is exactly what a terrorist organization would want. With no hope of defeating a much better equipped and professional nation-state army, terrorists hoped to get their adversary to overreact, to bleed itself dry, and to trample the very values it tried to protect. In this sense, al-Qaeda—though increasingly short on leaders and influence (a fact no one in Top Secret America would ever say publicly, just in case there was another attack)—was doing much more damage to its enemy than it had on 9/11.
And:
Terrorists in Yemen were thought to be actively plotting to strike the American homeland, and, in response, President Obama had signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos there. The commandos had set up a joint operations center in Yemen and packed it with consoles, hard drives, forensic kits, and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence, and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations serving their needs from the United States. That was the system as it was intended.
But when that dreaded but awaited intelligence about threats originating in Yemen reached the National Counterterrorism Center for analysis, it arrived buried within the daily load of thousands of snippets of general terrorist-related data from around the world that Leiter said all needed to be given equal attention.
Instead of searching one network of computerized intelligence reports, NCTC analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, merely to locate the Yemen material that might be interesting to study further. If they wanted raw material—transcripts of voice intercepts or email exchanges that had not been analyzed and condensed by the CIA or NSA—they had to use liaison officers assigned to those agencies to try to find it, or call people they happened to know there and try to persuade them to locate it. As secret U.S. military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike in the United States increased, the intelligence agencies further ramped up their effort. That meant that the flood of information coming into the NCTC became a torrent, a fire hose instead of an eyedropper.
Somewhere in that deluge was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He showed up in bits and pieces. In August, NSA intercepted al-Qaeda conversations about an unidentified “Nigerian.” They had only a partial name. In September, the NSA intercepted a communication about Awlaki—the very same person Major Hasan had contacted—facilitating transportation for someone through Yemen. There was also a report from the CIA station in Nigeria of a father who was worried about his son because he had become interested in radical teachings and had gone to Yemen.
But even at a time of intense secret military operations going on in the country, the many clues to what was about to happen went missing in the immensity and complexity of the counterterrorism system. Abdulmutallab left Yemen, returned to Nigeria, and on December 16 purchased a one-way ticket to the United States. Once again, connections hiding in plain sight went unnoticed.
“There are so many people involved here,” Leiter later told Congress.
“Everyone had the dots to connect,” DNI Blair explained to lawmakers. “But I hadn’t made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility.”
Waltzing through the gaping holes in the security net, Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 without any difficulty. As the plane descended toward Detroit, he returned from the bathroom with a pillow over his stomach and tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. And just as the billions of dollars and tens of thousands of security-cleared personnel of the massive 9/11 apparatus hadn’t prevented Abdulmutallab from getting to this moment, it did nothing now to prevent disaster. Instead, a Dutch video producer, Jasper Schuringa, dove across four airplane seats to tackle the twenty-three-year-old when he saw him trying to light something on fire.
The secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, was the first to address the public afterward. She was happy to announce that “once the incident occurred, the system worked.” The next day, however, she admitted the system that had allowed him onto the plane with an explosive had “failed miserably.”
“We didn’t follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence,” White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained later, “because no one intelligence entity, or team, or task force, was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation.”
Incredible as it was, after all this time, after all these reorganizations, after all the money spent to get things right, no one person was actually responsible for counterterrorism. And no one is responsible today, either.
More (#1) from Top Secret America:
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