Despite a top-to-bottom overhaul of the intelligence community after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the nation's security system showed some of the same failures nearly a decade later and allowed a would-be bomber to slip aboard an airliner, congressional investigators said Tuesday.
The Senate intelligence Committee report at times contradicted the Obama administration's assertion that the nearly catastrophic Christmas Day bombing attempt was unlike 9/11 because it represented a failure to understand intelligence, not a failure to collect and understand it.
The congressional review is more stark than the Obama administration's report. It lays much of the blame at the feet of the National Counterterrorism Center, which Congress created to be the primary agency in charge of analyzing terrorism intelligence.
"NCTC personnel had the responsibility and the capability to connect the key reporting with the other relevant reporting," the congressional summary said. "The NCTC was not adequately organized and did not have resources appropriately allocated to fulfill its missions."
The NCTC is the government's clearinghouse for terrorism information and is the only government agency that can access all intelligence and law enforcement information.
Lawmakers found that the NCTC was not organized to be the sole agency in charge or piecing together terrorism threats.
"Some of the systemic errors this review identified also were cited as failures prior to 9/11," Republican Sens. Richard Burr and Saxby Chambliss wrote in an addendum to the report. - FOX News Story
No comments:
Post a Comment