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The man who is accused of trying to bomb an American airliner on Christmas Day made his first appearance in court on Friday.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's trial will be another important test case of America's ability to try terrorist suspects in civilian courts.

It should all go well - just as the trial of Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui proceeded without incident.

But the Christmas Day bomb attempt is clearly asking pointed questions of America's ability to defend itself, and the contribution made to that defence by its spies.

Scattered info

US President Barack Obama said on Thursday that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded that plane at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam because of failures in America's intelligence system.


John Brennan
The intelligence fell through the cracks. This happened in more than one organisation.
John Brennan
Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security

But his words strongly suggested he believes the intelligence system is not fatally flawed, rather it just needs strengthening.

"The US government had the information scattered throughout the system to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack. Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence we already had."

Indeed, information about Mr Abdulmutallab - his radical leanings, his presence in Yemen, his contacts with extremist clerics - was in numerous US intelligence system databases.

But those fragments of knowledge floated on a huge tide of intelligence that swirls through the system every day. They never came together to form a coherent picture.

Familiar ring

All this sounds rather familiar. Was it not this inability to "connect the dots" that led to 9/11? No, says John Brennan, the president's counter-terrorism adviser.

He told journalists that before 9/11, information was jealously guarded by different intelligence agencies, and never shared.

Today, information sharing is not the problem, he insisted.


Instruction sign inside a body scanner at Schiphol airport
It may be unreasonable, even unfair, to blame the president for the failure of Dutch security officers to stop an alleged would-be suicide bomber. But that is what will happen.

In fact, so much information moves through the intelligence apparatus that analysts complain of feeling swamped and the bright little shards of knowledge that could prevent a plot from materialising can get lost.

"The intelligence fell through the cracks. This happened in more than one organisation. This contributed to the larger failure to connect the fragments of intelligence that could have revealed the plot, Abdulmutallab's extremist views, AQAP's (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) involvement with the Nigerian, its desire to strike the US homeland."

Mr Brennan draws a fine distinction between two sorts of bureaucratic failure. And it is perhaps a distinction that many Americans will find hard to grasp.

It may also be difficult for President Obama to convince Americans that yet another series of tweaks to the intelligence bureaucracy are an adequate response to the latest attempt on US lives.

Winslow Wheeler, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, writes that the bureaucratic approach is horribly flawed.

"You see, no-one is responsible for the mistake," he says. "It is processes that need changing, right?"

"When you want to pretend to reform something, fiddle with the organisational chart, which relieves the people who should be held accountable, earns you their praise for being oh-so-wise, and gets you to the next screw up."

Intelligence under attack

US intelligence has been bloodied in any number of ways in the last few weeks. Seven CIA officers lost their lives when an operation they were running in Afghanistan went horribly wrong and their own agent blew them up.

And then, eerily, a report appeared written weeks earlier by frustrated military officers which argued that intelligence collection and analysis in Afghanistan is grossly inadequate.

Maj-Gen Michael Flynn and Capt Matt Pottinger wrote that the US intelligence community "is only marginally relevant to strategy" in Afghanistan.

They wrote that "the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which US and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade".

The officers released the report not through their chain of command but through a private think tank, which lent it a curiously devastating impact.

So, in the course of a few months we have seen accounts of intelligence failures at the operational, analytical, and systemic level - all on garish public display.

For the Obama administration, all this is rather corrosive. It may be unreasonable, even unfair, to blame the president for the failure of Dutch security officers to stop an alleged would-be suicide bomber. But that is what will happen.

Political priority

Mr Obama is a Democrat, and Democrats seem perennially vulnerable to accusations of weakness on national security from their political opponents.

Consider this: weeks after Mr Obama announced 30,000 more troops would fight in Afghanistan, former Vice-President Dick Cheney accused him of "trying to pretend we are not at war".

The accusation, strange though it seems, continues to bounce around the internet echo chamber.

Towards the end of Mr Obama's speech on Thursday, he sought to recapture a sense of leadership and purpose in his national security policy.

"We will strengthen our defences but we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans," he said.

Bombings and intelligence failures have rammed national security back to the heart of America's political debate as we enter this election year.

Treacherous times for America's spies and the leaders who are accountable for their actions and their failures
source-http://news.bbc.co.uk

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Christmas Day attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner embarrassed President Barack Obama and put him on the defensive, but there may be a silver lining for U.S. authorities, it may provide new intelligence on al Qaeda.

U.S.  |  Barack Obama

A Nigerian charged in the incident, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, spent months in Yemen and told investigators he had trained with al Qaeda militants who took refuge there to plot attacks against Americans.
The White House says he is already providing useful information. "Abdulmutallab spent a number of hours with FBI investigators in which we gleaned usable actionable intelligence," spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Tuesday.
Potentially facing decades in prison, the 23-year-old Abdulmutallab could try to cut a plea deal with prosecutors in exchange for information he has about other plots, where he trained in Yemen and details about al Qaeda members he met.
That could be valuable in light of reports that Abdulmutallab, who attempted to blow up a transatlantic airliner as it approached Detroit, told investigators after he was captured that more attackers like him were on the way.
"We are continuing to look at ways that we can extract that information from him," Obama's top counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said on Sunday. "I think we have to assume that there are others out there."
However, Obama's Republican opponents -- led by former Vice President Dick Cheney -- have strongly opposed the idea of trying Abdulmutallab in a criminal court rather than a military tribunal, where looser interrogation rules apply.
They also have harshly criticized the idea of a plea deal.
"The administration's treatment could afford a murderous terrorist the opportunity to negotiate a plea bargain and a lesser punishment -- and that is not acceptable," said Rep. Eric Cantor, a top Republican in the House of Representatives.
Even with a plea deal, that would not necessarily mean that Abdulmutallab would get a lighter sentence. Convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid pleaded guilty and will be incarcerated for the rest of his life in a U.S. prison.
"Individuals in the past have, in fact, given us very valuable information as they've gone through the plea agreement process," Brennan said.
WHAT DOES HE REALLY KNOW?
Abdulmutallab was quick to tell investigators that he had trained in Yemen with al Qaeda operatives and they had given him the bomb and instructions on how to detonate it aboard the Detroit-bound jumbo jet, U.S. officials said.
Now he has a court-appointed lawyer who can help him navigate the U.S. legal system and potentially bargain for any other information he possesses, if indeed he has any.
One former counterterrorism official expressed some skepticism about what the young man can tell investigators about al Qaeda in Yemen because he was a foot soldier rather than a leader and al Qaeda is made up of many separate cells.
Also he could offer old information or details designed to misdirect U.S. authorities.
"They're going to do everything they can to glean information," said Rick Nelson, director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Homeland Security Program. "I just don't see this guy helping us that much."
"The best this guy might be able to do is lead U.S. intelligence and law enforcement to the people he dealt with directly, but it's not going to lead up the chain of command to a long line of senior al Qaeda leaders," he said.
While Republicans have criticized the Obama administration's decision to pursue charges against Abdulmutallab in a U.S. criminal court rather than a military tribunal, that route has seen some recent success.
In October, American David Headley was initially charged in a federal criminal court for plotting and scouting targets for an attack on a Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005, which offended many Muslims.
After he was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, he began cooperating with investigators and revealed that he had also helped scout targets in the 2008 Mumbai attacks for the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba -- the first American to be connected to that attack.
His cooperation led U.S. authorities to charge him for his alleged role in that attack, in which six Americans died, as well as providing new details about how an American was recruited, potentially helping deal with a new fear: the radicalization of Americans sympathetic to such causes.
SOURCE-http://www.reuters.com