Too Many Dolts to Connect
U.S. was more focused on al-Qaeda's plans abroad than for homeland, report on airline bomb plot finds By Karen DeYoung and Michael A. Fletcher Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, January 8, 2010; A01 By concentrating on the strategic threat posed by the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen and its plans for attacking U.S. targets there, U.S. intelligence agencies failed to focus on the group's preparations for a direct strike in this country, a White House review of the Dec. 25 attempted airline bombing has concluded. That lapse, along with insufficient attention to separate warnings that a specific person -- Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab -- may have been recruited by extremists in Yemen, led to a breakdown in systems designed to "connect the dots" about an imminent threat to the homeland, President Obama said Thursday in announcing the findings.
"The U.S. government had the information . . . to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack," he said. "Rather than a failure to coll…