Word: abdulmutallab
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...blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer." He announced no demotions or discipline for anyone, while taking personal responsibility for the oversights. "When the system fails, it is my responsibility," he said. (See pictures from the life of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
...Perhaps not, but security experts in Europe - sympathetic to the task their American peers face - say that it may be understandable. One of the reasons U.S. authorities may have missed clues or not properly examined them in the Abdulmutallab case is that they are forced to sort through a massive tide of intelligence on a daily basis, two experts tell TIME. They note that the warnings about Abdulmutallab came from varying sources - including CIA intercepts in Yemen and the U.S. embassy in Nigeria - and were sent to different U.S. security organizations. Connecting the dots becomes more difficult when multiple streams...
...other expert, who asked to be identified only as a European intelligence official, understands the U.S. consternation over the failure to identify Abdulmutallab before he boarded Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. After all, the official says, an August CIA intercept of a phone conversation in Yemen caught extremists speaking of a Nigerian preparing a strike. And more recently, Abdulmutallab's own father alerted the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, of his concerns that his son's radicalization made him a security threat. Even as Abdulmutallab allegedly put his plot into motion, the official says, details of his movements...
...very basic, human-level details security people have looked for since Islamist terrorism rose as a threat," the European official explains. "But these are also basic details that can now get overlooked as surveillance becomes more technical and computerized and people wait for a warning beep to sound. Yes, Abdulmutallab should have been entered into U.S. systems, but even without that, someone somewhere should have seen these other details and checked them out." (Read "The Lessons of Flight...
...Despite the failure to do just that, officials say the Abdulmutallab case is the exception to the rule. The European security experts stress that international cooperation and intelligence sharing to fight terrorism have never been better. Both officials downplayed the tit for tat between London and Washington earlier this week over comments from British authorities that the domestic spy agency MI5 had given U.S. authorities early intelligence on Abdulmutallab. (It hadn't, because British authorities found no evidence that the Nigerian had been radicalized while studying in London from 2005 to 2008 and thus had no reason to sound alarm...