Obama vows to improve intelligence-sharing system

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration pledged Thursday to close gaps in the intelligence system that enabled a suspected terrorist carrying explosives to board a U.S.-bound plane and vowed to create a better system for sharing and analyzing information that floods the intelligence community.

The Obama administration based its assertions on the early findings of two inquires into what it calls the "human and systemic failures" that took place in the approach to the attempt to blow up a plane carrying nearly 300 people from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas. A Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, has been charged in the incident.

The administration would not release the conclusions but said Obama will hold meetings next week aimed at getting the tangle of government agencies responsible for fighting terrorism to more diligently assess and share information.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said she would send senior department officials to meet with leaders from major international airports in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and South America to review security procedures and technology being used to screen passengers on U.S.-bound flights.

Senior administration and intelligence officials said the inquiries' preliminary findings show that in some cases, systemic problems, including a lack of interagency coordination, prevented key pieces of information from being shared or matched up.

But in other cases, intelligence analysts simply didn't connect the disparate pieces already in their computer databases that could have flagged Abdulmutallab and stopped him from boarding Northwest Flight 253, according to officials familiar with the investigation.

In Hawaii, where Obama and his family were vacationing, a senior administration official said the various intelligence breakdowns identified in the inquiry are being addressed.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said "when we do have information and when we have good information — as we often do, given how good our intelligence professionals are — the failure to share that information is not going to be tolerated."

According to intelligence and administration officials, the lack of communication and intelligence sharing is especially apparent in the Abdulmutallab case.

Starting in August, the National Security Agency intercepted some communications between senior members of al-Qaida's regional network in Yemen in which they discussed possible attacks involving an unidentified Nigerian.

But those intercepts were vague, did not refer to potential attacks on the U.S. homeland and were not highlighted as an urgent cause for concern for the nation's analysts at the CIA, the National Counter-Terrorism Center or elsewhere in the U.S. intelligence community, according to officials familiar with the communications.

In November, Abdulmutallab's father told officials at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that his 23-year-old son had become radicalized, fallen in with a group of extremists and might have traveled to Yemen.

Much of that information was sent back to Washington in a classified cable, and while officials at CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., prepared a formal report on the information, it was not shared with the larger intelligence community until after the Christmas bombing attempt, according to one intelligence official.

Administration officials have said that report contained information that could have placed Abdulmutallab on federal lists that would have subjected him to additional screenings or barred him from flying.

But other officials said the CIA did send the raw data from the father's visit to classified computer networks available to all analysts at the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), the agency set up after Sept. 11 as a central clearinghouse for intelligence. Some U.S. officials said the raw data would not have flagged the suspect because it was too vague.

Abdulmutallab's name was merely added to a general threat database of 550,000 names that is not cross-checked with other databases.