Word: threats
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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...
...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 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...
...While on vacation in Crawford, Texas, on Aug. 6, 2001, Bush received a warning that "bin Laden was determined to strike in U.S." and that al-Qaeda might hijack airliners. The threat was laid out in his Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), the specialized morning readout that winnows down mountains of raw data into a "finished intelligence" report and is one of the most important of the intelligence community's products...
...took more than a year for reporters to discover the existence of Bush's Aug. 6 PDB, but already questions are being put to the White House about Obama's briefings. Did any possible AQAP threat to the homeland ever appear in a PDB or any other briefing? How many times was Obama briefed on it? What threats were described? Did the President ask any follow-up questions? Did he task anyone to take any particular actions? Were any of AQAP's tactics, like explosives sewn into clothing, mentioned in briefings to the President? (See pictures of the foiled...