‘Systemic failure’ by US security agencies led to attempted bomb attack on plane, admits Obama

United States President Barack Obama has said that it was a “systemic failure” in security that helped a Nigerian man to attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day.

The President said the US intelligence agencies missed the “red flags” that would have placed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber, on the ‘no-fly’ list. He admitted that information which could have prevented Abdulmutallab from getting into the plane had not received the attention it deserved.

Abdulmutallab should have been on a list of people banned from flying into the United States, President Obama said at a US military base in Hawaii, where he is holidaying with his family.

The President went on to admit that the United States government “failed to heed warnings” that Abdulmutallab is a potential terrorist threat even after his father informed the US authorities that he is concerned about his son’s terrorist connections.

The 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has been charged with smuggling explosives onto the Northwest Airlines Flight 253, flying from Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, and attempting to blow up the plane as it was preparing to land in Detroit in the United States. Had the attempt been successful, the 300 passengers and crew on board would have perished.

It was in 2008 that Delta Air Lines, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, the United States, bought the US-based Northwest Airlines.

Reports in the US media said President Barack Obama made the remarks on intelligence failure on the part of the United States after he was told at an intelligence briefing that the United States did have prior information from various sources on terrorists planning attacks. These pieces of information, if put together, could have pointed to the incident that took place on Christmas Day.

The New York Times newspaper quoted unidentified officials of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as saying that the United States had received information from Yemen that leaders of a branch of the terrorist outfit al-Qaeda were talking about “an unidentified Nigerian” getting ready for an attack.

The CIA, The New York Times added, had information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as early as in November 2009, when his father went to the United States Embassy in Nigeria seeking the embassy’s help in “finding” his son.

The CIA indeed worked to make sure that Abdulmutallab’s name was put in the government’s terrorist database, including his possible terrorist links in Yemen, The New York Times said, quoting the CIA officials.

The September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States had led to the creation of the US Department of Homeland Security as well as an overhaul of the system of intelligence-gathering by the US aimed at better sharing of information among over one dozen agencies.