Word: umar
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Here's a fact about the underwear attack that you might have missed in the media shoutfest: it failed. It failed, first of all, because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was just one terrorist. Once upon a time, al-Qaeda's modus operandi was to launch multiple, simultaneous attacks. That way, even if one attack failed, the entire operation wouldn't. On 9/11, the network deployed 19 hijackers on four planes; on 12/25, by contrast, it managed only one. Second, the underwear attack failed because Abdulmutallab wasn't particularly well trained. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were personally selected by Osama...
...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...
...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...
Wherever the line between inspiration and operation is drawn, al-Awlaki seems to have come very close to crossing it. White House officials say e-mail exchanges with al-Awlaki may have spurred Major Nidal Malik Hasan to go on a rampage in Fort Hood, killing 13 people. And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas Day bomber, reportedly told the FBI he had met with al-Awlaki in Yemen. Moreover, research into al-Awlaki's past has now revealed that he had been investigated by the FBI for his connections to al-Qaeda as long...
...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...