US aware of al-Qaeda's attack plot
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The US intelligence community knew of al-Qaeda's plot to bomb an US flight on the Christmas, but it could not pinpoint the terrorist group's target out of flooding information before Dec. 25, according to a TV report on Wednesday.
The CBS news report cited an a high-ranking counterterrorism official as saying that despite knowledge of a "Christmas surprise" al-Qaeda threatened to make, the U.S. intelligence agencies were not able to piece together the details in time to prevent the attempted bombing of a Delta/Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to Detroit, Michigan.
"We'd been tracking this stuff for months, without being able to connect the dots of what was happening, and what was going to happen," said the official. " The problem is they get 8,000 messages a day, but we couldn't come up with something that was credible."
The official attributed the failure to "how smart our enemy is," saying that as al-Qaeda is recruiting across a wider and wider spectrum, "it is becoming more and more" difficult to profile terrorist suspects.
"We're looking for any young Arab Muslim men between 21 and 40, but they know that as well, so they're actively recruiting folks outside that spectrum," he added.
A 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is son of a prominent banker and graduate of a known British college, attempted to ignite an explosive device attached to his body on the flight.
Last month, his father reported to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria about his son's radical thoughts and potential attack against the United State. Abdulmutallab's name was added to a terrorist watch list but not on the "no-fly" list.
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