The Administration's Big Mistake

Beyond the headlines, here's what strikes me about the president's Christmas Day bombing intelligence review. John Brennan plays it straight: "I told the president today I let him down.  I am the president's assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism. And I told him that I will do better and we will do better as a team."  OK, so he could say that, but how do we know that Brennan himself believes that he could have done better?  Here is what he told journalists who asked him about a particular (and fairly stunning admission) in the unclassified portion of the review:

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is an extension of al Qaeda core coming out of Pakistan.  And, in my view, it is one of the most lethal and one of the most concerning of it.  The fact that they had moved forward to try to execute this attack against the homeland I think demonstrated to us -- and this is what the review sort of uncovered -- that we had a strategic sense of sort of where they were going, but we didn't know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here.  And we have taken that lesson, and so now we're full on top of it.

Translated: the U.S. government did not believe that AQAP posed a significant, real-time security threat. That was a fundamental reason why intelligence derived from Yemeni sources about on plots against the U.S. hatched in Yemen did not set off alarm bells. Chatter about Yemen did not comport with a mindset that had taken hold among policymakers. They assigned a probability score, of sorts, to the information that turned out to be way to low.

This is a startling concession from Brennan. It means that, for whatever reason, even though outside analysts have been worried about AQAP plots about the U.S. for a while, the U.S. intelligence community did not believe that AQAP had matured to that level. This is a major analytical mistake -- or it seems like one.  There had been plenty of discussions about Yemen, and the U.S. was clearly concerned about the fertile soil there for extremism -- but no policy maker seems to have taken the intelligence about AQAP's intentions seriously enough to significantly alter counterterrorism policies regarding AQAP's ability to threaten the U.S. 

This is the missing piece of the puzzle. AQAP has been in existence for about a year.  It was was seen as a regional threat, a source of theological nourishment for Al Qaeda fighters. Other incarnations of Al Qaeda movements in Yemen trained John Walker Adam Gadahn, the "American Taliban." Saudi Arabia has been worried about Yemeni terrorist plots for at least six years.  Yemen. Poverty. Civil war. Close to Somalia. Problems with its water table. A tiny bit of oil to sell. A node, not a hub. A breeding ground, but not a base.

Is this NCTC director Michael Leiter's fault?  He told Congress this year that Yemen "a key battleground and potential regional base of operations from which al-Qaida can plan attacks, train recruits, and facilitate the movement of operatives."  Notice he talks about "regional" base and a battleground, and not as a launching point for plots against the U.S.  Basically, the administration seems to have believed that AQAP would confine itself to attacks against Saudi Arabia or U.S. interests overseas in the near-term.

The CIA, incidentally, is a bit defensive about all of this. Earlier this week, director Leon Panetta told staff that he was increasing the agency's resources covering Yemen and Africa, "areas that have been of concern to the agency for a long time," CIA spokesman George Little said in a statement.   Indeed, Brennan's intelligence review cites as the major failings the failure of the analytical process to accurately determine type of threat AQAP posed and recommends an immediate increase in the number of analysts devoted to the problem.