by Scott Shane
—
Now, as it grew later on Christmas Day and Obama was briefed on the latest details from Detroit, Awlaki’s name surfaced again. The bomb had flamed but not exploded, and passengers and flight attendants had jumped on Abdulmutallab to smother the fire. The intelligence agencies quickly found evidence that the young Nigerian arrested in Detroit had traveled to Yemen to find Awlaki. By the time Obama kept a planned appointment to stop by Christmas dinner at the nearby Kaneohe Marine Base, he had learned just how close the brush with disaster had been. He was beginning to grasp the dimensions of the failure of the nation’s bulked-up, multilayered counterterrorism defenses, which had cost billions of dollars over the past eight years. A slight twenty-three-year-old with no experience in terrorist plotting or spy tradecraft, seemingly recruited for the mission by Awlaki, had penetrated airport security, the very part of the security system that had received the most attention after 9/11.
Worse, as agencies plugged Abdulmutallab’s name into their vast databases, officials recognized with dread and dismay the pattern so familiar from 9/11: they had collected multiple, damning pieces of information about the perpetrator but had somehow failed to connect and act on them. And the key evidence came not from some shadowy informant or an ambiguous snippet of an intercepted call, but from Abdulmutallab’s father, a wealthy and respected Nigerian banker. He had visited the American embassy in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to warn officials that his son had embraced militant religious views, traveled to Yemen, and sent a good-bye text message from there. What more blatant warning could there be, and what more credible source? The name of the young Nigerian had gone into the biggest terrorist watchlist, the so-called TIDE database, but it had not been added to the no-fly list, nor had his visa to enter the United States been canceled. I spoke a few days after Christmas with Tom Kean, the former New Jersey governor, who as chairman of the national 9/11 Commission was only too familiar with terrorism tips lost in the bureaucracy. He sounded furious. The father’s cry from the heart about his militant son should have awakened even the most jaded bureaucracy, he believed. For him, it was depressing déjà vu, another postmortem on agency failures. “It’s totally frustrating,” Kean said. “It’s almost like the words being used to describe what went wrong are exactly the same.”
The lives of the 290 people on board Northwest Flight 253 had been saved, not by the government’s counterterrorism behemoth, but by flawed bomb design and alert passengers. And from the moment a shaken flight attendant first spoke to him, Abdulmutallab could not shut up about what he had been trying to do. He’d tried to detonate an “explosive device,” he told her. He answered every question of the Customs and Border Protection agent who walked him off the plane, barefoot and wrapped in a blanket: he was with Al Qaeda, he’d obtained the bomb in Yemen, and his goal was “to bring the plane down over US soil.” It was yet another refutation of the notion, put forth by defenders of the CIA’s brutal interrogations, that committed jihadists would talk only if subjected to fear and pain. In fact, like Abdulmutallab, most ideologues loved to talk about what they were doing and why.
Taken to the University of Michigan hospital for treatment of the burns to his thigh and genitals, Abdulmutallab kept talking. He explained to a paramedic and a doctor how the syringe was supposed to detonate the bomb. He told a nurse that he was not depressed or suicidal—martyrdom was his goal. He told the FBI counterterrorism agents who had rushed to the hospital essentially the whole story, while obscuring real names: how he had gone to Yemen to find Al Qaeda; how he had been introduced to a man he called Abu Tarak; how Abu Tarak had suggested the plan to blow up a plane; how Abu Tarak had introduced him to the Saudi bomb maker who had designed an explosive that would be undetectable to airport metal detectors; and how Abu Tarak had set two requirements for his mission—that he should choose an American plane and make sure it came down over American territory.
Then, after being taken away for treatment, he clammed up and was read his Miranda rights, a decision that Republicans later seized upon to amplify Cheney’s complaint about the Obama administration: that it was treating terrorism not as war but as crime. In fact, Abdulmutallab had already said more than enough to implicate himself in attempted mass murder and to keep intelligence agencies busy for months. Counterterrorism analysts who had immersed themselves in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, knew immediately who the Saudi bomb maker was: Ibrahim al-Asiri, who had dispatched his own brother the previous August to try to kill Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief. They also strongly suspected what intercepted calls and e-mails indicated and Abdulmutallab would later confirm: that much of what the Nigerian said about “Abu Tarak” was in fact about Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki was Sheikh Anwar, whose online eloquence had helped persuade Abdulmutallab to devote himself to violent jihad; whom he had come to Yemen to find; and who had coaxed him through all the preparations, including bomb training and the recording of a martyrdom video. AQAP would include a minute or so of Abdulmutallab’s martyrdom message, spoken in stilted Arabic, in a web video with the title, perhaps overly optimistic, of America and the Final Trap.
—
With his cerebral approach to the hyperemotional realm of terrorism, Obama believed that the Bush administration had sometimes played into the terrorists’ hands, magnifying the impact of terrorist plots by devoting breathless press conferences to them. Terrorists seek to provoke panic, his logic went—Why help them? It was partly for that reason that Obama kept to his vacation schedule on Christmas and in the next couple of days, as aides assured reporters he was “monitoring” the investigation.
That turned out to be a political misstep. Already by the morning of December 26, Republicans were filling the vacuum with the Cheney narrative—the president is on vacation while the nation is at war. Representative Peter T. King, the pugnacious Long Island Republican whose own history as an avid supporter of the Irish Republican Army never discouraged him from calling others soft on terror, was as usual one of the loudest voices. But in this case King had a point. “This was an assault on the United States,” he said on CNN, “and it is important at a time like this that the president of the United States or someone in the administration with stature step forward—whether it be the Vice President or the Secretary of Homeland Security, but basically, we see—there is no face of the administration on this issue.”
Obama’s aides fumed privately that the Republicans were helping Al Qaeda turn a failed attack into a success by playing up the close call and accusing the administration of weakness. “We, the United States’ political and media culture, basically created a shit storm that turned it into a win for AQAP,” an Obama aide told me. “Because suddenly you had every Republican on cable saying, ‘This is the worst thing ever.’ ” The aide’s complaint, however logical, was irrelevant. As Al Qaeda’s leaders knew well, terrorism was not only about what happened but about how the American and global media reported it. If the administration chose not to put the president forward to frame the event, his political opponents would happily take his place.
Obama and his aides realized their tactical error, and the president went before the cameras on December 28 at the Marine base. He wore a suit but no tie and called out a jaunty “Hey, guys” to reporters and marines as he walked in, but he made sure to use the word terrorist in his opening sentence. He listed the steps his administration was taking to prevent a recurrence but also tried to put the failed attack in perspective. He urged Americans to be “confident” and not to turn Al Qaeda’s failure into a victory. “An alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist,” he said.
By the day of the president’s remarks, and an additional statement he made the next day, some television commentators were remarking on the “silence” from Dick Cheney—a thinly disguised invitation. The former vice president accepted it on December 30 with a brutal statement to Politico. Cheney, who had served as defense secretary before Obama had graduated from law schoo
l, used the failed bombing as only one count in a sweeping indictment of the freshman president.
“As I’ve watched the events of the last few days,” Cheney wrote, “it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war.” Cheney piled on from there, complaining about the administration’s preference for Miranda rights and criminal trials for terrorists. “He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war,” Cheney wrote. “But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe.”
Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, fired back on a White House blog, noting that Cheney had attacked only Obama and not the Al Qaeda plotters. He brushed off Cheney’s claim that the president didn’t realize the country was at war. “I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama,” he wrote. Had the White House been more geared up for bare-knuckle battles with its critics, Pfeiffer might have noted that the deputy leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Said Ali al-Shihri, had been released from Guantanamo Bay by the Bush administration in 2007 before cycling through a Saudi rehabilitation program and joining the terrorist group in Yemen.
But Cheney’s pretending-we’re-not-at-war critique actually showed how the political discourse had become detached from actual events. Throughout his first year as president, Obama had kept up the steady pace of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan that Bush had approved only in the last six months of his presidency. More significantly, Cheney’s statement came just two weeks after Obama had expanded the new American policy of targeted killing to a second country, Yemen, where the only previous strike had taken place in 2002.
Far from being oblivious to the threat from AQAP, Obama had acted aggressively against the group, approving two strikes in the days before Abdulmutallab boarded Flight 253 in Amsterdam. In mid-December, the intelligence agencies had gotten wind of suicide bombers being dispatched from Yemen’s tribal areas to the capital, Sanaa. With counterterrorism officials panicky and no armed drones permitted at the base in nearby Djibouti, Obama had approved a December 17 cruise missile strike on what intelligence analysts described as an Al Qaeda training camp in the southern province of Abyan. That strike had killed as many as forty-one civilians, along with a number of militants, producing a political outcry in Yemen. Then on December 24 there was another American strike, targeting a house where AQAP leaders were believed to be meeting. Initial news reports that Anwar al-Awlaki was among the estimated thirty dead proved to be wrong. The opening salvos in Obama’s campaign against AQAP in Yemen might be accused of many things—including poor intelligence about civilians in the target zone—but Cheney’s repeated charge of “dithering” was not on the list.
On January 2, still in Honolulu, Obama used his weekly presidential address to counter his critics. In four minutes, speaking emphatically, he raced through the reports he had ordered up, the accountability he was demanding for the Christmas debacle, and the facts about the plot. He called it an “attempted act of terrorism” in his opening sentence and said it had been hatched in Yemen, which he called “a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies.” Then he took aim at Cheney’s repeated claim that Obama denied the country was at war. Recalling his vow to protect the country on Inauguration Day, he said: “On that day I also made it very clear: our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred, and that we will do whatever it takes to defeat them and defend our country, even as we uphold the values that have always distinguished America among nations.” With that last phrase, he lobbed a brick back at the former vice president, who had presided over torture, rendition, and secret prisons.
But Obama did not mention the most obvious refutation of the Cheney critique—the two American strikes that he had approved in Yemen in December. The United States had agreed with Yemen’s government not to reveal that its forces had carried out the strikes. The media had nonetheless immediately unearthed the American role, and the Yemeni public had no doubts about who had launched the missiles. But the president felt he had to honor the assurances of secrecy. It was not the last time that the Obama administration’s insistence on maintaining silence about strikes that the entire world knew about would get in the way of a sensible discussion of American policies.
Obama’s ruined Christmas, and his critics’ raucous response, were in a sense to be expected. Every recent president had been ambushed by terrorist acts and the political freight they carried. Jimmy Carter’s presidency had been upended by the seizure of the American embassy in Iran; Ronald Reagan’s thrown off balance by the Beirut bombings of 1983; Bill Clinton’s disrupted twice, by the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and again by the bombing of two embassies in East Africa in 1998. Then there was the indelible image of Bush reading aloud The Pet Goat to Sarasota schoolchildren on the morning of 9/11 as an aide leaned over to whisper that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. His presidency would be remade in ways unimaginable at that moment. The scale of the casualties on 9/11, of course, made it stand out. But the power of anti-American terrorism usually has less to do with body counts than with the brazen challenge it represents to a superpower’s confidence and control. It is catnip for journalists and opposition politicians, who first suggest that the president must somehow be to blame for the attack and then taunt him with variations on the theme: Are you going to let them get away with this?
If that predictable pattern had not been obvious to the Obama White House before December 25, it was in the days that followed. Day after day, the media of a country of three hundred million people was dominated by an attack that had killed nobody and severely injured only one person: the attacker, whose genital burns struck many Americans as particularly just deserts for his crime. Then, on December 30, just as the White House was beginning to recover its balance, word came of a more lethal disaster in Afghanistan. A promising Jordanian source, a physician who dabbled in militancy and had told CIA officers that he had access to top Al Qaeda officials, turned out to be a double agent. He had blown himself up at the CIA base in Khost Province, Afghanistan, killing seven CIA officers and contractors and two others. Among the agency’s main jobs at the Khost base was to collect intelligence to target drone strikes in nearby Pakistan. Though drones were valued for keeping Americans far from danger, Al Qaeda had found a way to strike back.
—
Each Tuesday, in the Situation Room in the White House basement, cabinet officers, military commanders, and intelligence agency chiefs would gather at the long table with the president, with others beamed in from overseas on the big video screens. These Terror Tuesdays, as West Wing wags called them, were organized by John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, and usually included a review of reported threats and discussions of terrorists being targeted. Some participants, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton among them, thought the sessions were often too “tactical,” too far down in the weeds of plots and targets for the attention of such high-ranking officials. Sometimes the president, aware of such grumbling, would broaden the discussion to cover the causes of radicalization and the adequacy of the broader strategy against Al Qaeda.
On January 5, back at the White House, Obama presided at the most highly charged counterterrorism meeting of his year-old presidency. His tone was somber, and the crowd of “principals,” or agency chiefs, and assistants standing along the walls was bigger than usual. David Axelrod, the president’s political guru, made a rare appearance at a security meeting, underscoring the broader implications for the presidency of the close call over Detroit.
When Obama got angry, aides said, he didn’t scream and yell. Instead, his manner grew somber and his questions became more rapid-fire. This time he stopped just short of the obvious accusation—that those present, himself included, had failed the country. “I’m
very disappointed,” he said. “I’m really unhappy.” He hardly had to spell out the obvious question: How was it possible, after eight years of colossal post-9/11 spending to build an impenetrable shield against terrorism, that a twenty-three-year-old Nigerian banker’s son had nearly taken out an airliner over Detroit?
Different agency heads gave preliminary accounts of what they believed had gone wrong on their turf: Secretary of State Clinton spoke about Abdulmutallab’s visa—missed in a review because his name had been misspelled in the computer system. Leon Panetta, the CIA director, spoke about why the agency had not fully shared the information it had from his father’s visit to the embassy in Abuja. Michael Leiter, of the National Counterterrorism Center, discussed why nuggets of information about the young Nigerian dispersed among various agencies had never been put together. So went the grim round of self-criticism.
As a chastening thought experiment, Obama urged the assembled security grandees to imagine that the bomb had in fact exploded and the airliner had been destroyed, dwarfing every act of terrorism in the country since 9/11. For this crowd of terrorism specialists and political veterans, he didn’t have to lay out all of the implications. Yes, 290 people would have been dead—289 plus the bomber. Yes, the air travel system would have been disrupted even more radically than it had been by the scare. Yes, the visceral public fear that had faded over eight years would return, and the feeling that Al Qaeda could strike at will would be resuscitated.
But that was not all. The Cheney critique would appear to be vindicated, and many Americans would accept it: For seven years after 9/11 Bush and Cheney had kept America safe (albeit after ignoring the warning signs before 9/11). Now Obama’s feckless weakness had allowed the terrorists to strike again. It did not require a vivid imagination to play out the likely consequences. Obama would have faced huge political pressure to retaliate in Yemen, where he was loath to send American troops. “Part of his point was that the pressure on us would be to do a lot more in Yemen,” said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser. “Everything we were trying to do to scale back military involvement in the region would have been reversed.” Obama’s big ambitions on health coverage, immigration, and inequality would have been put aside, possibly forever. The president would have had to devote even more of his time to counterterrorism—and to defending the administration’s record. He might easily have ended up a one-term president, tarred with a terrorism failure on his brief watch. To a degree that no one wanted to contemplate, the fate of Obama’s presidency had been hanging in the balance when Abdulmutallab pushed that plunger.