America
Citing 26/11, US report says FBI needs to improve
By
By Arun Kumar Washington, March 26
Citing the November 2008
Mumbai terror attack and four other cases, a report has concluded the US
FBI has made strides in the past decade but needs faster reforms to
transform itself into a threat-based, intelligence-driven organisation.
One
of the key plotters of the 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai,
Pakistani-American David Coleman Headley "had previously come to the
attention of US law enforcement authorities but FBI officials repeatedly
concluded that Headley did not pose a threat at the time", the report
noted.
"The increasingly complex and dangerous threat environment
it faces will require no less," said the report by the FBI 9/11 Review
Commission which studied FBI investigations into five "significant
terrorism events."
In none of those cases did a confidential
source "provide actionable intelligence to help prevent or respond to a
terrorist operation", the report released Wednesday said.
The
principal authors of the report were Bruce Hoffman, a professor of
security studies at Georgetown University; Edwin Meese III, the former
attorney general; and Timothy J. Roemer, a former ambassador to India.
In
December 2007, Headley's Moroccan wife complained to officials at the
US embassy in Islamabad that her husband was a terrorist. But the FBI
investigation of Headley did not begin until 2009, and it was triggered
by a tip that originated outside the FBI that revealed his relationships
with extremists abroad, the report said.
"One of the main
lessons from the Headley case is that absent an intelligence effort
across the US Intelligence Community to understand the connections among
cases and complaints across field offices, relevant intelligence may
fall by the wayside," it said.
News outlets, it noted, have
reported, prior to his terrorist activities, that Headley had worked as a
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant in the late 1990s and
the early 2000s, following two heroin trafficking arrests.
"A
single complaint may be more easily dismissed as a poison pen motive,
but several unrelated complaints should not be dismissed as readily as
the work of a malcontent," the report said.
"The Headley case
raises the important question faced by all intelligence agencies -
certainly important to the FBI - of how to scan and assess voluminous
amounts of collected information strategically and identifying valuable
intelligence leads," the report said.
"Still, more than a decade
after 9/11, the FBI must prioritize empowering and equipping its
analytic cadre to make these connections with cutting edge technology,
to minimize the risk of the FBI missing important intelligence
information," it said.
In the Headley case, an analyst was
ultimately able to connect him to an ongoing plot in Denmark,
underscoring the value of good intelligence analysis in the field to
meet the FBI's national security and investigative missions, it said.
Describing
Headley as "an elusive target," the report noted that "he conducted his
activities with all the skills of a trained intelligence operative -
able to travel to and from the United States, Pakistan, and India with
relative ease and eluding authorities."
"The FBI had no knowledge
of Headley's connections to Lashkar-i-Taiba (LeT) until provided with a
tip that originated outside the FBI that prompted the investigation in
2009."
In Chicago, National Security Letters helped the FBI track
David Headley and better understand his involvement in the Copenhagen
plot directed by Ilyas Kashmiri, Al Qaeda's chief of external operations
at the time and the head of the Pakistani extremist organization,
Harakat ul Jihad al Islami.
Over the next several months, the FBI
obtained warrants on Headley and on his associate Tahawwur Hussain
Rana, a Pakistani Canadian resident of Chicago.
Based on the
information obtained, FBI special agents decided to arrest Headley
before he could leave the country, the report noted.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])