'Connecting the dots:' 9/11... Christmas

by Mark Silva

During the summer of 2001, "the system was blinking red.''

During the winter of 2009, "red flags'' were waving.

Yet, the way that critics might have it, after eight years of declared war - with a congressionally approved joint authorization for the use of military force against those responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 - the sprawling U.S. intelligence community still is having trouble interpreting traffic signals.

"During the spring and summer of 2001, U.S. intelligence agencies received a stream of warnings that al Qaeda planned, as one report put it, "something very, very, very big,'' the report of the 9/11 Commission concluded, with an executive summary noting that: "Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet told us,"The system was blinking red.'''

This time, in the months before a Nigerian man boarded a U.S.-bound airliner wearing explosives, not only had the intelligence community intercepted messages from Yemen about an attack in the planning, but the man's father also had warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria that his son had become radicalized. The man's son, like the men who carried out the airline hijackings of 9/11, paid for his ticket with cash.

"Much of the public commentary about the 9/11 attacks has focused on "lost opportunities,'' the 9/11 Commission reported many years ago. "Though characterized as problems of "watch-listing,'' "information sharing or connecting the dots,'' each of these labels is too narrow. They describe the symptoms, not the disease.''

Today, as President Barack Obama cited the intelligence community for a breakdown in analysis that nearly led to another catastrophe, he said: "Elements of our intelligence community knew that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had traveled to Yemen and joined up with extremists there. It now turns out that our intelligence community knew of other red flags -- that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike not only American targets in Yemen, but the United States itself.

"And we had information that this group was working with an individual who was known,'' Obama said, "who we now know was in fact the individual involved in the Christmas attack.''

Only preliminary internal reviews have been made of the attempted 2009 Christmas Day bombing. Only the president and his advisers have seen all the details so far. But once again, the public has been told of "red flags,'' which, like the "red lights'' of 2001, were tragically missed.

"The bottom line is this,'' Obama said today. "The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the "no fly" list.''

In the parlance of Washington, overused phrases tend to lose their meaning over time - words such as "transparency'' and "connecting the dots'' -- and now, "red flags'' and "red lights.'' Eight years and then some after 9/11, it appears that failing to connect the dots and see the red lights and flags again were only symptoms, not the disease.