Photo Credit: USAToday.com
Earlier today, President Obama was briefed on the preliminary results of two reviews into the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an American passenger in route from Amsterdam to Detroit. The president has ordered his senior advisers and transportation agency heads to meet with him in Washington next week after the new year “to discuss our ongoing reviews as well as security enhancements and intelligence-sharing improvements in our homeland security and counterterrorism operations.”
On Tuesday, President Obama released a statement saying that there had been a “systemic failure” in the nation’s security technology, but he offered no further evaluation today as he waited for more details. President Obama was briefed by John O. Brennan, his counterterrorism adviser, and by Janet Napolitano, his secretary of homeland security, during two separate phone conversations.
The briefings looked to shed light on what went wrong in the intelligence and aviation screening systems that allowed the native Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to board Northwest Flight 253 with explosives in his underwear.
According to The New York Times:
The reviews were expected to tell the president that the government had in its possession information from phone conversations intercepted by the National Security Agency that leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula based in Yemen were talking about an unnamed Nigerian who would carry out a terrorist attack. But that information was not correlated with warnings from the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab that might have pointed to his plans to blow up the Northwest flight.
