Explaining the failure to head off the Christmas Day airline bomb plot, President Barack Obama blamed the “system.” Yet his prescriptions for preventing a repeat of the near catastrophe amount to a tweaking of that system, not an overhaul on a scale of the post Sept. 11 reforms. Among the more concrete steps Obama announced Thursday: assigning responsibility for investigating all leads on high-priority terrorism threats, “so that these leads are pursued and acted upon aggressively — not just most of the time, but all of the time.” In the case of the Christmas plot, US intelligence knew an Al-Qaeda affiliate was intending to strike the US but did not follow up leads. Obama also gave little indication that he would fire anyone over an episode for which he has drawn heavy political heat. “It appears that this incident was not the fault of a single individual or organization, but rather a systemic failure across organizations and agencies,” Obama said, declaring himself ultimately at fault. Other intelligence-related fixes the president announced were narrower in scope. For instance, he said intelligence reports would be distributed more rapidly and more widely. “We can't sit on information,” he said. Another of his prescriptions for mending the system, while abstract on its face, may cut closest to the core of the problem. That is to strengthen the analytical system — how intelligence specialists dissect information, assess its importance and integrate it with other nuggets in order to “connect the dots” that form a plot-in-the-making. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the government tried to put a sharper focus on sharing and melding intelligence information in order to head off a repeat. But in the intervening years the challenge has grown as the volume of “dots” — snippets of information related to potential terrorist plots — has vastly expanded. Compounding the problem is a relative lack of experienced intelligence analysts. “We don't have nearly enough of them,” said Charlie Allen, a former head of intelligence collection at CIA. Analysts take pieces of information — like the disparate threads available before the Christmas Day episode — look at them, correlate them and then make a “very strong leap in order to reach a decision,” Allen said. “It takes experience.” Many CIA and other government intelligence analysts have been hired only in the past five years. In demanding a stronger government-wide effort to prevent a repeat of the Christmas Day episode, Obama also acknowledged that he was demanding the impossible. “There is, of course, no foolproof solution,” he said. After the Sept. 11 attacks, after the fanatical shoe-bomber tried to blow up his flight to Miami in December 2001 and now after the Christmas Day attack aboard a Detroit-bound airliner, the government has turned its gaze inward and effectively said, “Oops.” In every case it has pledged renewed vigilance to prevent future attacks, and citizens collectively cross their fingers. Yet despite spending billions, producing lists, creating new government agencies, locking cockpit doors and subjecting travelers to extraordinary scrutiny, the system has failed again. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian suspect in the foiled airliner attack, was to make his first appearance in federal court Friday in Detroit for an arraignment and a hearing to determine if he stays in custody. He is accused of trying to destroy a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit by injecting chemicals into a package of pentrite explosive concealed in his underwear. James Thompson, a Republican member of the national commission that investigated the failures that led to the 9/11 attacks, praised Obama for hitting all the right notes in addressing the missteps and proposed solutions. Rafi Ron, the top security consultant at Boston's Logan International Airport, advocates more personal screening of passengers, specifically at the point where a government security officer compares their boarding pass and identification. Anyone deemed suspicious should receive an extended interview and more weapons screening, he said. “We think that if we just add more and more machines, we, at some point, we will create a situation that will be impossible for the terrorists to act. Obviously, this is doomed to fail,” Ron said Wednesday. “There are so many ways to use the loopholes left by technology.”
