Washington: As US President Barack Obama on late Tuesday conceded of systemic intelligence failure, media reports
said that the CIA knew about the Nigerian terror suspect
involved in a thwarted Christmas Day plane attack.
Several American media organisations yesterday reported
that the father of Nigerian terror suspect Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab had met the CIA officials in Nigeria and briefed
them about his son`s radical links.
The news reports claimed that this report was not shared
by the CIA with other agencies.
"Had that information been shared, the 23-year-old
Nigerian who is alleged to have bungled an attempt to blow up
a jetliner as it was landing in Detroit, Michigan, on
Christmas Day might have been denied passage on the Northwest
Airlines flight," a source was quoted as saying by the CNN.
Abdulmutallab, 23, has been charged with attempt to blow
up a US plane on December 25.
The CBS News reported that as early as August of 2009 the
Central Intelligence Agency was picking up information on a
person of interest dubbed "The Nigerian", suspected of meeting
with "terrorist elements" in Yemen.
This Nigerian has now turned out to be Abdulmutallab, it
said.
"We must get better at collecting these bits of
information, putting them together at a central point,
analysing them and then acting," Lee Hamilton, the vice-chair
of the 9/11 Commission, was quoted as saying by CBS news.
"Two officials said the government had intelligence from
Yemen before Friday that leaders of a branch of al Qaeda there
were talking about "a Nigerian" being prepared for a terrorist
attack," The New York Times reported.
Obama was briefed about it by his intelligence aides
yesterday morning in Hawaii, where he is spending his year-end
vacation.
Soon thereafter, Obama made his second statement on
December 25 incident saying that this was a systemic
intelligence failure.
"When our government has information on a known extremist
and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should
have been, so that this extremist boards a plane with
dangerous explosives that could cost nearly 300 lives, a
systemic failure has occurred," Obama said.
"I consider that totally unacceptable," said the US
President.
According to The New York Times, the government also had
more information about where Abdulmutallab had been and what
some of his plans were.
"Some of the information at the time was partial or
incomplete, and it was not obvious that it was connected, the
official said, but in retrospect it now appears clear that had
it all been examined together it would have pointed to the
pending attack," the daily said.
PTI
