Congress rehashes the pants bomber fail

This morning, members of congress questioned key counterterrorism officials about the Pantsbomber and Ft. Hood incidents. The Senate Homeland Security Committee heard testimony from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter, and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in public and classified sessions. The Senate Judiciary Committee interviewed FBI Director Robert ...

Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Mark Wilson/Getty Images

This morning, members of congress questioned key counterterrorism officials about the Pantsbomber and Ft. Hood incidents. The Senate Homeland Security Committee heard testimony from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter, and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in public and classified sessions. The Senate Judiciary Committee interviewed FBI Director Robert Mueller and State’s Patrick Kennedy. And at 2:30 this afternoon, the Commerce Committee started hearing testimony from Napolitano, Leiter, and the 9/11 commission’s Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton.

The key word? Failure.

"Let me start with this clear assertion," read the prepared testimony for Leiter, "Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should not have stepped on that plane. The counterterrorism system failed and I told the President we are determined to do better."

Later: "The counterterrorism system failed…We didn’t do things well and we didn’t do things right."

With more elaboration: "As the President has said, this was not — like in 2001 — a failure to collect or share intelligence; rather it was a failure to connect, integrate, and understand the intelligence we had."

So too with Napolitano, pilloried for suggesting shortly after the attack that "the system worked." Today, she was all about the f-word.

Blair, Napolitano, and Leiter squabbled about just who failed to do what, with Blair and Leiter stressing signal-to-noise problems and Napolitano stressing flawed intel hampering the security protocol. Politico reports: "’The bottom line is this: He was not on the no-fly list,’ [Napolitano] said, calling DHS a ‘consumer’ of the information on the list. In the aftermath of Abdulmutallab’s attempt, ‘the DHS responded,’ she said."

Senators at the hearings seemed interested in getting accountability for the failings, not just figuring out what they were — a task now assigned to longtime CIA operative John McLaughlin.

"Where does the buck stop with respect to these failures?" asked Byron Dorgan, a Democrat of North Dakota — a point echoed strongly by Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent of Connecticut, and Sen. John McCain, a Republican of Arizona. The latter two senators, indeed, are calling for someone’s head to roll, with Blair, who has recently and publicly clashed with CIA Director Leon Panetta, considered vulnerable.

So, plenty of elaboration on fail.

What I’d like to hear more about? The manhunt for radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in the States and now lives in rural Yemen. He allegedly advised both the Pantsbomber and the Ft. Hood shooter — and the U.S. and Yemeni forces are currently targeting him with troops and drone strikes.

Annie Lowrey is assistant editor at FP.

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