President Barack Obama received a “high-level” security briefing concerning possible holiday attacks against the U.S. just days before Christmas, Newsweek has reported.
The relevance of that briefing is crystallized following the fumbled Christmas Day terror attack as an American airliner began its landing preparations in Southeast Michigan.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, of Nigeria attempted to ignite explosive devices hidden in his underwear on a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, Michigan. The President was presented with documents with vague information, Newsweek reports, three days in advance of this near-successful plot to bring down the plane. However, there was no mention of any specific plot or country of origin in the briefing.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, an Obama administration official said beginning in early December, “based on reports coming in from intelligence agencies, policy makers began tracking a stream of information that alluded to a possible holiday-period plot against the U.S. orchestrated from somewhere in Pakistan,” Newsweek reports. However, nowhere in the document the President received, was there any mention of Yemen, whose connection with Al Qaeda has been stated by Obama as being behind the bungled Christmas Day terrorist plot.
Along with the president, representatives from agencies concerned with counterterrorism and counterintelligence were present in the White House Situation Room, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Deputy Director Steven Kappes and David Gompert, the principal deputy to national intelligence czar Dennis Blair.
Newsweek reports further that, in light of the Christmas Day scare, the U.S. government had “bits and pieces of information, which, if they had been properly knitted together, could have … allowed us to disrupt the attack or certainly to know much more about the alleged attacker in such a way as to ensure that he was on, as the president suggested in his statement, a no-fly list.”
Abdulmutallab’s ability to board a flight from Nigeria to Amsterdam and then to the United States, despite the fact the intelligence community pegged him as a individual of interest, has been the subject of political arm-wrestling in Washington.
The administration official described the pre-attack intelligence as “garbled” and was considered “a washout”. He says that “as veiled as the message was, it was spotted, processed, analyzed, and presented to senior policymakers as a warning sign—however vague—of a holiday attack. While this was handled properly, there were, to put it mildly, virtually no details at all. That happens.” – terry shropshire
