Had his explosives detonated as planned, a deadly terror attack on that plane would have followed — little more than eight years after terrorists climbed aboard four other planes and killed 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
While the mood of the country since that time is that the system has greatly improved, the stark reality is that it has not. The culprit then continues to be the culprit now — a failure to effectively share intelligence information among the agencies charged with the responsibility, not only to gather it, but to disseminate it properly.
When the bi-partisan 9/11 Commission made its final report for sweeping changes, it wrote: “The biggest impediment to all-source analysis — to a greater likelihood of connecting the dots — is the human or systemic resistance to sharing information.”
Sadly, it appears that is still the case.
There had been plenty of signs along the way. The man’s own father had turned his son’s name in to intelligence officials because he had fallen in with extremists in Yemen, believed to be a breeding ground for al-Qaida brand terrorism.
Intelligence failed to connect the dots of his visa history, showing he was allowed to fly in the U.S. They failed to connect conversations between the suspect and a known al-Qaida member.
It was reminiscent of the intelligence gathered, but never passed on, leading to the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting rampage where 13 people were killed. The Federal Bureau of Investigation knew of the suspect’s ties to a radical cleric in Yemen who wanted Muslims to kill U.S. soldiers a year before he opened fire on fellow troops. But the critical information never made it to higher-ups before the tragedy.
It is long past time to get all intelligence agencies working together to keep the country safer, and it is hoped that the administration will be relentless in its quest to do just that.
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