[Infowarrior] - Despite Intelligence Overhaul, Shadow of 9/11 Is Cast Again

[Richard Forno]

December 31, 2009
News Analysis
Despite Intelligence Overhaul, Shadow of 9/11 Is Cast Again
By SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31intel.html

WASHINGTON — The finger-pointing began in earnest on Wednesday over  
who in the alphabet soup of American security agencies knew what and  
when about the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up an airliner.

But the harshest spotlight fell on the very agency created to make  
sure intelligence dots were always connected: the National  
Counterterrorism Center. The crown jewel of intelligence reform after  
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the center was the hub whose mission was  
to unite every scrap of data on threats and suspects, to make sure an  
extremist like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber, would  
never penetrate the United States’ defenses.

“N.C.T.C. is supposed to be the nerve center,” said Amy B. Zegart, who  
studies intelligence at the University of California, Los Angeles.  
“It’s the fusion center of all fusion centers. So if something was  
missed, that’s where the blame is going to go.”

Officials at the counterterrorism center — a small agency in a modern  
glass building in suburban Virginia — maintained a stoic silence on  
Wednesday, noting that the review ordered by President Obama was still  
under way. But those who led the major studies of how the United  
States government failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks watched the  
unfolding story of the Christmas Day attack with growing dismay.

“It’s totally frustrating,” said Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the  
national Sept. 11 commission. “It’s almost like the words being used  
to describe what went wrong are exactly the same.”

Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint Congressional inquiry into  
Sept. 11, called the emerging story “eerily similar to the disconnects  
and missteps we investigated.”

“There seems to have been the same failure to put the pieces of the  
puzzle together and get them to the right people in time,” Ms. Hill  
said.

Their dissections of the 2001 attacks came out years afterward, based  
on a mountain of classified records and hundreds of interviews.

By contrast, the review of how Mr. Abdulmutallab was permitted to  
board a Detroit-bound airliner with explosives in his underpants has  
barely started. A full account may show that the failures were not as  
egregious as they appeared on Wednesday, or as Mr. Obama has suggested.

But two critical pieces of information appear never to have been  
connected: National Security Agency intercepts of Qaeda operatives in  
Yemen talking about using a Nigerian man for an attack, and a warning  
from Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father to American diplomats in Nigeria about  
the son’s radicalization in Yemen. If the National Counterterrorism  
Center or any other agency had those two items and never linked them,  
Congress and the public will want to know why.

The echoes of Sept. 11 are obvious. Before the attacks on New York and  
the Pentagon, the N.S.A., the Central Intelligence Agency and the  
Federal Bureau of Investigation all had gathered bits of intelligence  
about the future hijackers. The C.I.A. sounded the alarm about an  
impending attack, including the now-famous President’s Daily Brief of  
Aug. 6, 2001, titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

But the information that could have unraveled the plot remained at  
each of the three agencies and was never put together.

The remedy, proposed by the Sept. 11 commission and passed by Congress  
in 2004, was to place a single director of intelligence over the  
nation’s 16 spy agencies. At the core would be the National  
Counterterrorism Center.

In 2004 and since, critics of the intelligence reorganization  
complained that the new spy czar had too little power and merely added  
a cumbersome layer of bureaucracy. But even the critics applauded the  
counterterrorism center, which now must defend its performance.

Ms. Zegart, author of “Spying Blind: The C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the  
Origins of 9/11,” said she was especially disheartened that the near- 
miss last week was, once again, on an airplane.

“This is textbook Al Qaeda 2001,” she said. “They tried to hit the  
hardest target we have, the one on which the most money and attention  
has been spent since 2001. And yet we didn’t prevent it.”

Some observers of counterterrorism cautioned against claims that  
nothing had improved since 2001. Intelligence analysts from one agency  
now routinely serve for a time in another agency, to develop personal  
ties. Databases of suspected terrorists are far more complete and  
accessible. The ban on hoarding data is strictly enforced.

“It is the death penalty if you are not sharing threat information,”  
said Kip Hawley, who headed the Transportation Security Administration  
until January. That agency, for example, participates in daily  
briefings run by the counterterrorism center, and at times National  
Security Agency analysts visit counterparts at the T.S.A. to walk them  
through intercepts, he said.

Yet the flood of intelligence collected against a scattered and  
shadowy terrorist network continues to grow, threatening to overwhelm  
the system, said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian whose book,  
“The Secret Sentry,” examines the N.S.A.

The eavesdropping agency, tracking e-mail and cellphone traffic around  
the world, each day collects four times the volume of information  
stored in the Library of Congress, Mr. Aid said.

“To pluck out the important threats is an almost impossible task,” he  
said.

In the case of Mr. Abdulmutallab, the N.S.A. appears to have captured  
critical intercepts, and his father provided the name that would have  
allowed American agencies to take action.

For Mr. Kean, of the Sept. 11 commission, it is the father’s role that  
should have moved even the most jaded bureaucracy.

“Think of what it took for the father, one of the most respected  
bankers in Nigeria, to walk into the American Embassy and turn in his  
own son,” Mr. Kean said. “The father’s a hero. His visit by itself  
should have been enough to set off all kinds of alarms.”

Eric Lipton contributed reporting.