Word: brennans
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...John Brennan, Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, is now President Barack Obama's official attack dog in an escalating war of words with Republicans. He has taken on the task of appearing in the media to systematically rebut what he says are politically motivated criticisms of the Administration's counterterrorism tactics. Brennan is a good pick for the job. A longtime CIA official who was blocked by the Democratic left from becoming the head of the CIA because of his service under former President George W. Bush, Brennan has the look of a prizefighter and presents...
...satellites. His connection to both the Nov. 5 massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, and the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a passenger jet over Detroit has persuaded the Obama Administration that al-Awlaki is a big-time bad guy. On Jan. 4, President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, told CNN, "Al-Awlaki is a problem ... He's not just a cleric. He is in fact trying to instigate terrorism." (See pictures of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
...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...
...Administration has dodged some of these questions. When Brennan was asked on Jan. 7 when the specific threat posed to the homeland by AQAP first became known, he did not directly answer the question. He did acknowledge that he traveled to Saudi Arabia last September to investigate AQAP's attempted assassination of the kingdom's top counterterrorism official. That attack used explosives sewn into clothing and detonated with a chemical trigger, which is harder to detect than a traditional metal trigger...
...Monday, a senior Administration official speaking on condition of anonymity told TIME that after Brennan's trip, the U.S. intelligence community produced a finished-intelligence report noting that such "chemically triggered" bombs "would pose a particular challenge to screening efforts." Although there was no indication the bombs were intended for use against airliners, "our analysts did, however, assess that such IEDs of this new sort could be used in an aviation-focused attack," the official said...