The U.S. intelligence community failed 14 times to identify and stop Umar Abdulmutallab from trying to detonate a bomb on board a Detroit-bound airliner, says a Senate Intelligence Committee report quoted by the Detroit News. The 12-page unclassified summary of the report notes that errors were made in understanding information and knowing what to collect, similar to the errors that occurred before the 9/11 attacks.
The report found that the State Department didn’t revoke Abdulmutallab’s visa despite having ample information to do so; parameters for adding people to no-fly lists were followed too rigidly, which kept the 23-year-old Nigerian off the watchlists; and officials were focusing too closely on terrorism abroad instead of in the United States. “There were systemic failures across the Intelligence Community,” the report said, accusing the National Counterterrorism Center of being “not organized adequately to fulfill its missions.”