Word: al-qaeda
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President George W. Bush was widely criticized for failing to focus before 9/11 on what U.S. intelligence knew of al-Qaeda's threat to America. But was President Barack Obama similarly remiss in the months before the attempted Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound airliner? So far, the White House hasn't provided enough information to make the judgment...
...lapses that had allowed a suspect known to U.S. intelligence to board an airliner allegedly carrying explosives on his body. On Jan. 7, the President's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, laid out what he said were the facts of the failure. "It was known that AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the group that took responsibility for the attempted attack] not only sought to strike U.S. targets in Yemen," Brennan said, "but that it also sought to strike the U.S. homeland. Indeed, there was a threat stream of intelligence on this threat." (See pictures from the life...
...Brennan said the intelligence community had failed in not pursuing that threat stream and piecing it together with other information it had gathered. "We didn't follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence indicating that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike our homeland, because no one intelligence entity or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation. The intelligence fell through the cracks. This happened in more than one organization...
...about his radical tendencies--has led to increased scrutiny of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration and its policies. Abdulmutallab, who was charged in federal court with attempting to destroy an aircraft, told U.S. officials that he was given the explosives and instructions on how to use them by an al-Qaeda group in Yemen...
...they are being unfairly persecuted. They are still smarting from Britain's decision to use antiterrorism laws in 2008 to freeze Iceland's assets and force the country to agree to reimburse the British savers. "The British government used gunboat diplomacy, putting us in the same category as al-Qaeda and the Taliban," says Magnus Arni Skulason, a founding member of InDefence, a grass-roots campaign that helped secure 62,000 names - over a quarter of Iceland's 320,000 people - on a petition calling for the referendum. Skulason says Iceland has become the whipping boy in the financial meltdown...