Obama awaits intelligence reports on botched bombing

OBAMA FOR USA

A first probe into lapses that almost led to an explosion on a transatlantic airliner reportedly found Thursday that US government agencies failed to share key information about the would-be bomber.

President Barack Obama was to be handed the findings of an initial inquiry after denouncing the "systemic" failures in the build-up to the December 25 failed attack on a Northwest plane traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit.

And as followers of the Al-Qaeda affiliate which has claimed the attack clashed with Yemeni government troops in their stronghold, Washington ramped up its military and economic aid to the improverished Gulf nation.

According to The Washington Post, the report for Obama will detail how agencies failed to share or highlight intelligence gathered about the young Nigerian who tried to detonate explosive chemicals sewn into his underpants.

The Post, citing unnamed administration officials, said the report also would conclude "others were insufficiently aggressive in seeking out what was known about" 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is now in custody.

Despite reports about officials' failure to "connect the dots," "the real story line internally is not information-sharing or connecting dots. That's a dry hole," a former intelligence official told the Post. Related story: Plot exposes intel pitfalls

"Information was shared. It was separating noise from chaff. It's not that information wasn't passed around, it's that so much information is being passed. There's an inherent problem of dealing with all the data that is sloshing around, and the practical matter of where you set your threshold."

Former CIA director Porter Goss pointed a finger at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as part of the problem.

"Everything that happened on December 25 is exactly the stuff that's not supposed to happen anymore because of the new structure created with the DNI," he said, according to the Post.

"What we're now seeing is that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has not made one iota of improvement."

Other US media said intelligence agencies believed Al-Qaeda was plotting a "Christmas surprise" but the counterterrorism office was too flooded to pinpoint a suspected airplane bomber.

"We'd been tracking this stuff for months, without being able to connect the dots of what was happening and what was going to happen," CBS television quoted a high-ranking unnamed intelligence official as saying.

The official said the problem lay at the National Counterterrorism Center, which tracks terrorist threats and gets "8,000 messages a day."

"We couldn't come up with something that was credible -- so we assumed Al-Qaeda was still in the planning stages," he added.

Fully four months ago, the National Security Agency intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen on a plot using a Nigerian man in a future terrorist strike, The New York Times reported Thursday. But "American spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week?s attempted airline bombing," the Times added.

An angry Obama, who was told Tuesday there had been warnings of a Christmas Day attack, has ordered two reviews after Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed it was behind the plot.

Abdulmutallab is suspected of trying to blow up the flight and receiving training for his mission in Yemen from an AQAP bomb-maker there.

The attack has further brought the Gulf State under the microscope, as concerns grow that it has become a haven for Islamic terror groups.

Wednesday, Yemeni security forces wounded several Al-Qaeda suspects and arrested one in clashes as it called for Western help to rout the Islamist militants.

An official told AFP the fighting erupted during an operation to arrest Al-Qaeda suspects in the Deir Jaber region north of the city of Bajil.

The United States meanwhile indicated it was sharply increasing military and economic aid to Yemen, as it has in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to fight a growing threat from Al-Qaeda.

Obama has also demanded a review of the no-fly list system and a report into how Abdulmutallab managed to get past security at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport.

The CIA rejected accusations that it failed to share vital information about Abdulmutallab that might have led to his being placed on a no-fly list.

"We learned of Abdulmutallab in November, when his father came to the US embassy in Nigeria and sought help in finding him. We did not have his name before then," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano.

Related article:Bomb bid reframes US profiling debate He said the CIA had worked with the embassy to ensure Abdulmutallab was placed in the US terrorist database.

"We also forwarded key biographical information about him to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)" Gimigliano said.(AFP)

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