WASHINGTON — Despite a top-to-bottom overhaul of the intelligence community after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the security system showed some of the same failures nearly a decade later and allowed the Christmas Day underwear bomber to slip aboard an airliner, congressional investigators said yesterday.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report at times contradicted the Obama administration’s assertion that the nearly catastrophic Christmas Day 2009 bombing attempt was unlike 9/11 because it represented a failure to understand intelligence, not a failure to collect and understand it.
The congressional review is more stark than the Obama administration’s report. It lays much of the blame at the feet of the National Counterterrorism Center, which Congress created to be the primary agency in charge of analyzing terrorism intelligence.
The NCTC is the government’s clearinghouse for terrorism information and is the only government agency that can access all intelligence and law enforcement information.
Lawmakers found that the NCTC was not organized to be the sole agency in charge of piecing together terrorism threats.
“Some of the systemic errors this review identified also were cited as failures prior to 9/11,” GOP Sens. Richard Burr and Saxby Chambliss wrote in an addendum to the report.