White House: No ‘smoking gun’ in airplane plot

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – A top White House official  said yesterday the plot to bomb a Detroit-bound plane on  Christmas Day exposed errors but he played down the need for a  sweeping overhaul of the U.S. security system.

John Brennan, a senior White House adviser on  counterterrorism, said there was no “smoking gun” that would  have alerted authorities to the attempted bombing.

Facing criticism over the foiled attack on a Northwest  Airlines flight, the Obama administration announced plans for  closer screening of airline passengers from 10 countries.

They are Nigeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya,  Somalia, Iran, Sudan, Syria and Cuba. The last four are on the  U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Passengers flying from or through those countries will be  patted down and have their carry-on luggage searched, according  to a U.S. official.

President Barack Obama, who returns on Monday from a  vacation in Hawaii, has found himself on the defensive after a  23-year-old Nigerian man — who U.S. authorities say was linked  to al Qaeda — was allegedly able to board the Christmas Day  flight from Amsterdam with explosives in his underwear.

Security experts said there seemed to be a failure to  connect the dots in the case of accused bomber Umar Farouk  Abdulmutallab, whose father told the U.S. embassy in Nigeria of  his concerns about his son’s increased radicalization.
Brennan said on ABC’s “This Week” that the incident pointed  to the need to make the security and intelligence systems more  “robust” and that Obama would do that.

But he added: “There was no single piece of intelligence —  a smoking gun, if you will — that said that Mr. Abdulmutallab  was going to carry out this attack against that aircraft.”

“What we had, looking back at it now, were a number of  streams of information,” said Brennan, the deputy national  security adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security.

Republicans have seized on the plane incident to accuse  Obama, a Democrat, of not focusing enough on counterterrorism  issues and said it exposed intelligence gaps that have lingered  on since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked-plane attacks.