Word: abdulmutallab
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...means that even in places like Pakistan and Yemen where al-Qaeda or its affiliates retain some organizational presence, it is much harder to train lots of would-be terrorists for complex, mass-casualty attacks. In response, al-Qaeda seems to be relying more on solo operators, people like Abdulmutallab, Fort Hood gunman Major Nidal Malik Hasan and Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan American arrested last year for allegedly plotting to blow up buildings in New York. These lone wolves are harder to catch, but they're also less likely to do massive damage. Al-Qaeda's new motto, according...
...meeting, the heads of the intelligence agencies admitted to a string of mistakes that brought Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab within a fortuitous malfunction of blowing up Flight 253 over Detroit. The National Security Agency had known from an intercept in Yemen that al-Qaeda had recruited a Nigerian to carry out a terrorist attack; another intercept had suggested some sort of attack around Christmas. The State Department had learned from the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that the son of a prominent Nigerian banker had joined extremists in Yemen. The CIA had even produced a background report on Abdulmutallab. All this...
...weren't they connected? One reason: there are too many dots. The NCTC's 300 analysts sort through thousands of reports a day. "Nobody's denying that the information [about Abdulmutallab] was out there, but there was lots of other information too," says an intelligence official who asked that neither he nor his agency be named. "And lots of the information is vague and doesn't rise to the level [of alarm...
...amount of information they circulate to one another, but that can cause confusion as well as clarity. "There's a lot of paper shuffling, not true integration," Zegart says. And yet, some critical pieces of info apparently were not shared: the State Department neglected to alert the NCTC that Abdulmutallab had a valid U.S. visa...
...didn't help that no single piece of information about Abdulmutallab was conclusive. For instance, a father's complaining that his son had joined the jihadist cause in Yemen doesn't automatically point to a threat to the homeland. Obama has vowed to improve intelligence sharing, but some experts are skeptical that the system can ever be fail-safe. "The next time, we may not have this many data points," says Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University. "It may never be this good again...