Obama Administration Received Warnings About Attempted Terrorist Attack

NYTimes.com:

The National Security Agency four months ago intercepted conversations among leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen discussing a plot to use a Nigerian man for a coming terrorist attack, but American spy agencies later failed to combine the intercepts with other information that might have disrupted last week’s attempted airline bombing.

The electronic intercepts were translated and disseminated across classified computer networks, government officials said on Wednesday, but analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington did not synthesize the eavesdropping intelligence with information gathered in November when the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now accused of the attempted bombing, visited the United States Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization.

The father, a wealthy Nigerian businessman named Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, had urgently sought help from American and Nigerian security officials when cellphone text messages from his son revealed that he was in Yemen and had become a fervent radical.

A family cousin quoted the father as warning officials from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency in Nigeria: “Look at the texts he’s sending. He’s a security threat.”

The cousin said: “They promised to look into it. They didn’t take him seriously.”

The new details help fill in the portrait of an intelligence breakdown in the months before Mr. Abdulmutallab boarded a plane in Amsterdam with the intent of blowing it up before landing in Detroit.

Now you know that if a "systematic failure" like this had occurred during the Bush years, the leftist media would take turns frying the GOP, and rightfully so. Of course, it's now coming out that the Bush Administration may have released two for Guantanamo Bay detainees that had something to do with the attempted Christmas Day bomb attack the other day and yet, Barry's still talking about closing Gitmo. This comes after Barry took 3 days to speak publicly on Abdulmutallab (while on vacation no less) and Janet Napolitano's pathetic "the system worked" response. Again, when you elect liberals to the highest offices in the land, don't be surprised at the consequences.