The National Counterterrorism Center director, Michael Leiter, is looking vulnerable as accountability for the air terror intel failures seems to be landing heavily on his agency's doorstep. President Barack Obama and other officials have indicated the problem was not one of failure to collect or share information but to analyze and integrate it — the NCTC's job.
The New York Daily News reports that it doesn't help matters that Leiter didn't come back from a ski vacation after the attempted Christmas air terror attack:
Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center since 2007, decided not to return to his agency's "bat cave" nerve center in McLean, Va., until several days after Christmas, two U.S. officials said.
"People have been grumbling that he didn't let a little terrorism interrupt his vacation," said one of the sources. ...
Leiter's spokesman declined to say when the terror-center chief returned to Washington and fully retook the helm of his analysis agency, which is near CIA headquarters just outside the nation's capital.
"It is our policy to not make our director's schedule available to the public," center spokesman Carl Kropf said in an e-mail.
Leiter has long been well-regarded, and he was not the only official in the homeland security orbit to skip town for vacation during the holidays. President Obama himself stayed in Hawaii until Jan. 4.
But Leiter's decision to stay close to the ski slopes instead of his headquarters ... has raised eyebrows among intelligence officials, who have been scrambling since Dec. 25 to figure out what went wrong and plug the holes. ...
Without mentioning Leiter or the NCTC by name, Obama made it plain in a Tuesday speech that there was intelligence in the center's hands that should have been "fully analyzed and fully leveraged" to stop Abdulmutallab from boarding Northwest Flight 253. - Politico Story
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