‘I failed; I’m sorry; I’ll do better next time’

Randi Kreiss

No American could possibly take much comfort in the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack by a wannabe airplane suicide bomber. The good news was that the attacker was even more incompetent than our security services. His bomb misfired. Brave passengers wrestled him to the ground.

The small comfort we can take is that our leaders did not dissemble, cover up or shift blame. Our commander in chief held a press conference within days to say he took full responsibility for the security failures. John O. Brennan, the administration’s chief counterterrorism adviser, took the podium and told the country that he had let the president down.

In the day or two following the attempted bombing, Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, stonewalled, telling the public that “the system worked.” It didn’t take long for her to backtrack, eating crow, along with her words.

With impressive speed, the administration analyzed the information, the warnings and the alerts that had been available to security experts — available and mostly ignored or improperly communicated.

Following 9/11, it became apparent that inter-agency jealousy, competition and suspicion were a major stumbling block to sharing vital intelligence. Even in New York City, after the towers were hit, the fire department couldn’t communicate properly with the police department because their systems were different.

In Washington, and in our intelligence agencies abroad, there was an impressive failure to put disparate facts together before 9/11 and see the deadly picture they formed.

It is a poorly kept secret that the FBI doesn’t want to tell the CIA what it knows and the CIA plays it close to the vest with its own intelligence. The Army, Navy, Marines, Homeland Security and the State Department all have their people and their priorities. Despite the chastening experience of 9/11, that culture of mutual mistrust apparently persists.