Detroit Bomber ‘Singing Like a Canary’ Before Arrest
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Sunday Paper - January 10th, 2010
President Barack Obama is under fire over claims that the Christmas Day underwear bomber was “singing like a canary” until he was treated as an ordinary criminal and advised of his right to silence.
The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel.
The potential significance became chillingly clear this weekend when it was reported that shortly after his detention, he boasted that 20 more young Muslim men were being prepared for similar murderous missions in the Yemen.
The lawyer for the 23-year-old Nigerian entered a formal not guilty plea on Friday to charges that he tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on December 25 – even though he reportedly admitted earlier that he was trained and supplied with the explosives sewn into his underwear by al-Qaeda in the Arab state.
“He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up,” Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.
“I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal.”
Abdulmutallab could have been held and interrogated in military custody under existing US legislation before a decision was taken whether to charge him before a military tribunal or a civilian court, according to Michael Mukasey, the last Attorney General under President George W Bush.
Mr Mukasey argues that it was crucial to gain intelligence from him immediately as details about locations, names and other plots is subject to rapid change. For the same reason, he dismissed the argument by John Brennan, Mr Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, that investigators will garner valuable data during any plea-bargaining talks.
“He certainly should know that the kind of facts that Abdulmutallab might be expected to know have a shelf life that is a lot shorter than the plea bargaining process,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week.
Mr Obama announced a series of steps designed to “connect the dots” by tackling the failures in intelligence that meant Abdulmutallab was not identified as a terror suspect and the activities of the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen were not seen as a threat to the US homeland.
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He also declared: “We are at war against al-Qaeda”. The bold statement was welcomed by conservative critics who believe that Mr Obama has deliberately avoided using terms such as “war” and “terrorism” during his first year and initially described Abdulmutallab as an “isolated extremist”.
But they also say that the administration has demonstrated a lack of vigilance by downplaying threats and that charging the former London college student as an attempted mass murderer rather than a terrorist gives off dangerous mixed signals.
Dan Goure, a national security analyst and Pentagon adviser, said that the Obama administration’s philosophy and approach was fuelling the intelligence imbroglio.
“There is a strategic disconnect between the different parts of our government which are currently engaged in very different conflicts,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “Not everybody is at war and no amount of connecting the dots is going to deal with that issue.
“The president has finally acknowledged that we are at war, the military certainly knows it’s fighting a new kind of war, the intelligence community is not sure whether we’re at war and is keeping its head down and the justice and homeland security departments are treating terrorism as a crime and do not think we’re at war at all.”
The missed clues about Abdulmutallab and the terror plot came less than two months after the Fort Hood massacre committed by Maj Nidal Hasan, a Muslim officer about whom numerous red flags were missed. Both men were in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born preacher now based in Yemen.
And just five days after Christmas Day, a suicide bomber killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan after he was brought on to a US base without screening to meet agents who believed he was about to spill the beans on al-Qaeda’s top leaders.
The three incidents have caused a fresh crisis for the US intelligence community more than eight years after the Sept 2001 suicide attacks highlighted glaring weaknesses in how America’s 16 different spy agencies operated.
The bipartisan 9/11 Commission, of which Mr Gorton, a lawyer and former Republican senator, was one of 10 members, recommended a radical overhaul. At the heart of the shake-up was the creation of the National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC), drawing experts and analysts from sometimes competing agencies, under the auspices of the new Office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
The new offices were intended to force the disparate US intelligence world to share information and, in Mr Obama’s words, “connect the dots”.
But Mr Brennan’s investigation into the Christmas Day attack singled out the NCTC and the CIA for blame.
For although the new apparatus is much better at collecting information, it also seems to have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data now available. So when Abdulmutallab’s father reported his concerns about his son’s radicalisation to the CIA station chief at the embassy in Nigeria, his name was added to more than 550,000 already on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (Tide) database at the NCTC.
But despite multiple other clues accumulating inside the system – including electronic intercepts by the National Security Agency (NSA) referring to an airline plot, an unnamed Nigerian and an Umar Farouk – his name progressed no further through the system.
Both agencies have been ordered to improve their analysis work and establish responsibilities for who should be picking up the pieces so that another Abdulmutallab does not fall through the cracks, with potentially catastrophic circumstances.
The dressing down, combined with the Afghan suicide bombing, is another blow for the CIA. Founded in 1947, the agency has long been viewed as a glamorous elite institution defending freedom or a sinister manipulative organisation backing anti-communist dictators around the world – depending on political perspectives.
But morale has been in the doldrums under both Republicans and Democrats during the last decade. Former Vice President Dick Cheney made no secret of his hostility towards the agency after senior officers expressed doubt about the use of intelligence that was said to prove former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.
And after Mr Obama entered the White House, his Attorney General Eric Holder announced plans to investigate CIA agents involved in waterboarding interrogations of captured al-Qaeda chiefs. That move was greeted with a mixture of dismay and anger in at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
“People in Langley got the message and a lot of them are just hunkering down and watching their backs,” said a retired intelligence official. “The atmosphere is not really conducive to good intelligence work.”
Mr Obama and his intelligence chiefs have at least insisted that the old rivalries and lack of communication between agencies that predated the 9/11 attacks have been largely overcome.
But privately, US intelligence officers last week described tensions between agencies that continue to hamper operations. In particular, some CIA agents are scornful of law enforcement officers at the FBI whose role in intelligence gathering has been increased under the Mr Holder.
“Rivalry between the CIA and NSA remains intense, the CIA still does not fully respect the FBI, the 16 separate intelligence agencies in general do not trust the NCTC and the CIA leadership does not have good relations with the DNI,” said a veteran intelligence officer, deploying the alphabet soup of agency acronyms.
Indeed the bureaucratic rows and turf wars between the CIA under its director Leon Panetta and Admiral Dennis Blair, the DNI, reached such intensity recently that Gen James Jones, the president’s national security adviser, had to be called in to arbitrate.
Within the intelligence community, there is particular frustration at the DNI over the slow progress in introducing new computer technologies that would give analysts with appropriate security clearance the chance to filter databases across multiple agencies.
A pilot project for sharing data from the CIA and NSA is expected to launch this year. But a senior intelligence official said the government was spending just 10 per cent of what the private sector would invest on a similar project and Adm Blair was not pressing hard enough for a breakthrough.
It is this mess that Mr Obama is now starting to tackle – if belatedly, according to some critics. “This was not a failure of intelligence, this was a failure to act on the intelligence that we had,” said Mr Gorton.
“The president has been mugged by reality and he’s reacted positively. If only they were not trying Abdulmutallab in a criminal court.”
by Philip Sherwell
This from Telegraph.co.uk - January 9th, 2010
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