WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – A top White House official said yesterday the plot to bomb a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day exposed errors but he played down the need for a sweeping overhaul of the U.S. security system.
John Brennan, a senior White House adviser on counterterrorism, said there was no “smoking gun” that would have alerted authorities to the attempted bombing.
Facing criticism over the foiled attack on a Northwest Airlines flight, the Obama administration announced plans for closer screening of airline passengers from 10 countries.
They are Nigeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Iran, Sudan, Syria and Cuba. The last four are on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Passengers flying from or through those countries will be patted down and have their carry-on luggage searched, according to a U.S. official.
President Barack Obama, who returns on Monday from a vacation in Hawaii, has found himself on the defensive after a 23-year-old Nigerian man — who U.S. authorities say was linked to al Qaeda — was allegedly able to board the Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam with explosives in his underwear.
Security experts said there seemed to be a failure to connect the dots in the case of accused bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, whose father told the U.S. embassy in Nigeria of his concerns about his son’s increased radicalization.
Brennan said on ABC’s “This Week” that the incident pointed to the need to make the security and intelligence systems more “robust” and that Obama would do that.
But he added: “There was no single piece of intelligence — a smoking gun, if you will — that said that Mr. Abdulmutallab was going to carry out this attack against that aircraft.”
“What we had, looking back at it now, were a number of streams of information,” said Brennan, the deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security.
Republicans have seized on the plane incident to accuse Obama, a Democrat, of not focusing enough on counterterrorism issues and said it exposed intelligence gaps that have lingered on since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked-plane attacks.