Obama’s Counter-terrorism Grade?
Failed airliner attack was tardy wake-up call for spreading al Qaeda menace
29 Dec. DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources note that in the past year, Washington was strangely deaf to Saudi, Egyptian and Yemeni warnings that al Qaeda had established itself in Yemen and gained a jumping-off base into the Arabian peninsula and across the strategic Gulf of Aden. The network was now directly linked from Yemeni shores to Osama bin Laden at his new headquarters in Pakistani Baluchistan.
Only two months ago, on Oct. 7, President Barack Obama told the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia: “We’re making real progress in our core mission – to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and other extremist networks around the world. Because of our efforts, they have not only lost operational capacity, they’ve lost legitimacy and credibility.”
But three days before that speech, the FBI arrested the Chicagoan David Headley on charges of involvement in the terror massacre in Mumbai of November 2008. A month later, US Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan shot dead 13 comrades at the Fort Hood base in Texas. Federal investigators persist in refusing to call the crime an act of terror.
And Yemen has been on US radar since al Qaeda blew up the American destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbor on Oct. 12, 2000 and the CIA and the FBI have maintained a covert presence in this Red Sea country in the past year at least.
US intelligence and anti-terror machinery suffers from a serious disorder when it even failed to take up the Abdulmutallab family’s warnings about their fanatical kinsman.
Eight years after 9/11 no one was yet connecting the dots.


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