An American Lion

I am an American lion and I will tell you the truth, sir.

So begins the cover-up and the ass-covering and the lying:

The CIA learned the man’s name in November, when his father came to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria and sought help in finding him, officials said.

A U.S. intelligence official defended the agency’s handling of the elliptical information, telling POLITICO: “Abdulmutallab’s father didn’t say his son was a terrorist, let alone planning an attack. Not at all. I’m not aware of some magic piece of intelligence that suddenly would have flagged this guy — whose name nobody even had until November — as a killer en route to America, let alone something that anybody withheld.”

President Barack Obama said in a statement to reporters Tuesday in Hawaii: “[T]here were bits of information available within the intelligence community that could have and should have been pieced together.”

Got that part? An unnamed official has already started to spread the word that he was “not aware of some magic piece of intelligence that suddenly would have flagged this guy” and then qualifies it even more by saying “whose name nobody even had until November.”

This reveals a serious gap in how the CIA operates. First, we have targeted leaks to practice the art of pushback, rather than simply dealing with the issue. Leon Panetta should be resigning right now. Instead, his minions are working the refs. Second, the idea that the CIA needs a “magic piece of intelligence” before it can do anything is hilarious. You’re supposed to take “less than magical” pieces and perform basic analysis and take care to do all that you can to provide decision makers with the best intelligence possible. That means, that when you get word of a Nigerian link to Yemen, you begin tracking down every Nigerian who has traveled to Yemen. And if you can’t do that, get a new line of work. Third, if you had this man’s name in November, why in the hell wasn’t his name on the Do Not Fly lists well before Christmas? Does this mean that a terrorist organization now knows that it can have as many as thirty days before your hidebound bureaucracy moves to list and indentify their operatives?

Here’s where the lies begin to unravel:

Armen Keteyian, CBS News’ chief investigative correspondent, reported on the “CBS Evening News” that the Central Intelligence Agency had received information in August about a person of interest dubbed “The Nigerian,” suspected of meeting with terrorist elements in Yemen.

“Sources tell CBS News ‘The Nigerian’ has now turned out to be Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab,” Keteyian reported.

“But that connection was not made when Abdulmutallab’s father went to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria three months later — on Nov. 19, 2009 — and gave that warning to the CIA about his son’s ties to suspected al Qaeda operatives in Yemen. In fact, CBS News has learned that none of this information was connected until after the attempted Christmas Day bombing.”

CNN’s Jeanne Meserve quoted “a reliable source” as saying on Tuesday: “The father of terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab talked about his son with someone from the CIA and a report was prepared, but the report was not circulated outside the agency.”

So, from November 19 until Christmas, they did nothing. They sat on a vital piece of information, which, in and of itself was probably a little more critical and a little more credible than some of the other vague pieces of information that come in and they did nothing.

THAT is where the problem lies. The gap between November 19 and Christmas is the elephant in the room. That is more than enough time to disseminate and share a credible piece of information with everyone concerned with air safety, transportation safety in general, and the larger intelligence community. If a man walks into a United States Embassy and gives up his own son, you don’t need to track that back to some other piece of intelligence—you need to flag that piece of information as being a credible safety and security threat. There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of pieces of information. Each needs to be weighed carefully. But you add a little weight and a little sense of urgency to something credible.

I’m telling you, they’re lying to the American people and they’re getting away with it. Their invasive, all-encompassing security and intelligence apparatus is so broken and incompetent that it’s a wonder they can catch anyone at all. It is well past time to fire the men and women who are running these agencies and organizations and bring in new blood. It is well past the time to restore the privacy rights of Americans and get back to the days of protecting the American people with a watchdog looking over the shoulder of the overpaid contractor who is screwing up at his job. The American people surrendered their privacy for security, and the security they are now provided is flat busted broke.

Laura Rozen does a fantastic job of connecting more of these dots and explaining this better than I can…

UPDATE:

Wow! Talk about REALLY having to cover your ass now:

A man tried to board a commercial airliner in Mogadishu last month carrying powdered chemicals, liquid and a syringe that could have caused an explosion in a case bearing chilling similarities to the terrorist plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The Somali man - whose name has not yet been released - was arrested by African Union peacekeeping troops before the Nov. 13 Daallo Airlines flight took off. It had been scheduled to travel from Mogadishu to the northern Somali city of Hargeisa, then to Djibouti and Dubai. A Somali police spokesman, Abdulahi Hassan Barise, said the suspect is in Somali custody.

“We don’t know whether he’s linked with al-Qaida or other foreign organizations, but his actions were the acts of a terrorist. We caught him red-handed,” said Barise.

A Nairobi-based diplomat said the incident in Somalia is similar to the attempted attack on the Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in that the Somali man had a syringe, a bag of powdered chemicals and liquid - tools similar to those used in the Detroit attack. The diplomat spoke on condition he not be identified because he isn’t authorized to release the information.

Barigye Bahoku, the spokesman for the African Union military force in Mogadishu, said the chemicals from the Somali suspect could have caused an explosion that would have caused air decompression inside the plane. However, Bahoku said he doesn’t believe an explosion would have brought the plane down.

A second international official familiar with the incident, also speaking on condition of anonymity because he isn’t authorized to discuss the case, confirmed that the substances carried by the Somali passenger could have been used as an explosive device.

In the Detroit case, alleged attacker Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab hid explosive PETN in a condom or condom-like bag just below his torso when he traveled from Amsterdam to Detroit. Like the captured Somali, Abdulmutallab also had a syringe filled with liquid. The substances seized from the Somali passenger are being tested.

The November incident garnered little attention before the Dec. 25 attack aboard a flight on final approach to Detroit. U.S. officials have now learned of the Somali case and are hastening to investigate any possible links between it and the Detroit attack, though no officials would speak on the record about the probe.

No magical piece of intelligence, huh? And there was an attempt to pass off Abdulmutallab as a Sudanese refugee? Shouldn’t the East African connection have rung any warning bells?

Who will recite the obligatory Condoleezza Rice line—no one could have imagined them taking a man with East African ties, who was really from Nigeria, and having him try to light his underpants on fire and blow up a plane.

Jules Crittenden has a good roundup of events as well. There is a flood of information coming in, and there’s no question—a cover-up is well underway.

My comment to Larry Johnson, who puts his head in the sand and says it wasn’t the fault of anyone he cares about:

Norman Rogers
Let me get this straight—  
 
It’s not the job of the field office to do analysis—but it is the job of the people who receive their reports, correct?  
 
Well, who do they send their intelligence reports to? Who takes the very actionable reports that they receive? Isn’t there someone who is capable of taking an intelligence report and qualifying it as a more credible threat than something else? Doesn’t the CIA employ thousands of analysts who are then required to pass actionable intelligence reports to a broad chain of responsible individuals who are connected to the larger intelligence community? Why are we paying billions to these frauds to do nothing, then? Why do we have shredded privacy rights and politicians writing fundraising E-mails while no one does what they’re required to do by law?  
 
This young man’s father took the time to go into an American embassy and proceeded to tell whoever would listen to him that his son was dangerous. He did this in November. And, over thirty days later, the son gets on a plane, flies to the United States, and tries to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear. How much time does pantload A need in order to get something to pantload B in Washington?  
 
And, despite the fact that his father warned the CIA over thirty days before the incident happened, it still happened, primarily because the intelligence report passed from the embassy up the chain didn’t end up going to the people who needed it?  
 
Allow me to call bullshit. When, oh when, is it ever the fault of the people who are incompetent and don’t do their jobs? When will anyone ever be held accountable for failing to do an adequate job? From Obama to Panetta to Freeh to the worthless members of Congress to the acting secretaries and political appointees and the overpaid, useless contractors—who, exactly is ever to blame when there’s a massive, glaring screwup of monstrous proportions that could have killed hundreds of people?  
 
When do we stop carrying water for whoever we support politically and start holding people responsible for what they have failed to do? No one can stop every terrorist, but why do we have to have morons presiding over a broken system that can’t even catch a sad, lonely little man from Nigeria who couldn’t even swim through the drugs they gave him and blow himself up properly?