The failure in preventing the Christmas bombing plot was different from that in preventing the Sept.
"Before 9/11, there was often reluctance or refusal to share information between departments and agencies ... that is not what happened here," John Brennan, the deputy national security advisor for counter terrorism and homeland security, told a White House press conference.
He was authorized to lead a review in the terror watch-listing system, a key component of the U.S. counter terrorism efforts, after a Nigerian brought an explosive device to a U.S. international flight and attempted to blow up the aircraft with about 300 people aboard on Dec. 25, 2009.
When releasing the review's result, Brennan admitted that there were some fragments of intelligence available in the intelligence community on Christmas Eve, before the suspect boarded the flight in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, including his father's report to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria about his radical thoughts and plan to attack the United States.
It has long been known that al-Qaida is expanding its reach in the Arabian Peninsula centered on Yemen, where the suspected claimed he had received training and explosive device.
However, the U.S. intelligence community failed to connect the fragments of intelligence that could have revealed the plot, he said.
"This was a systemic failure across agencies and across organizations," he added.
On accusation that the same failure was made again eight years later in the Christmas incident, Brennan noted that no agency or individual was denied access to the information in the latter case, unlike time before 9/11.
He cited measures in four areas President Barack Obama announced before the press conference to fix the holes in the current security and intelligence systems, saying each of these corrective steps was assigned to hold every concerned agency accountable for their implementation.
The Christmas would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was put on the terror watch list but not the no-fly list one month before he got aboard the Delta Airlines flight to Detroit, Michigan. He tried to set off the explosive device but was subdued by passengers and crews.
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