A few quick thoughts after listening to Thursday's briefing by national security officials following President Barack Obama's White House statement on further steps in the wake of the Christmas Day Northwest Airline bomb as well as a reading the White House's summary of its review of U.S. counterterrorism missteps.

After 9/11, it was frequently said that many U.S. counterterrorism officials suffered from a failure of imagination. It appears one presidential administration later that's still a problem.

John Brennan, President Barack Obama's Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism was asked what information emerging from the review he found shocking.

He said:

MR. BRENNAN: It's al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is an extension of al Qaida core, coming out of Pakistan. And in my view, it is one of the most lethal and one of the most concerning of it. The fact that they had moved forward to try to execute this attack
against the homeland I think demonstrated to us — and this is what the review sort of uncovered — that we had a strategic sense of sort of where they were going, but we didn't know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here. And we have taken
that lesson, and so now we're all on top of it.

Some observers will find it shocking that Brennan was shocked by this.

Perhaps the biggest ally al-Qaida has is the tendency of U.S. officials to underestimate it. After 9/11, then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said repeatedly that no one imagined terrorists would fly airplanes into buildings.

This led some observers to suggest that the Bush Administration let loose its imagination.

 

It appears it took the Christmas Day bombing to increase the administration's respect for al-Qaida's operational ambitions. That's a good thing.

In terms of the White House report, what jumps out is that despite the billions of dollars the U.S. has spent since 9/11 on increasing its abilities at technological surveillance, it still takes the judgment of humans to "connect the dots."

For instance, even though the intelligence community was aware that al-Qaida in Yemen was a clear and growing threat, it didn't add more "analytic resources" to that problem.

Another example. While there was enough "derogatory" information in the intelligence databases to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallub, intelligence officials didn't perform the kind of searches that might have turned up the pertinent information.

The U.S. was fortunate on Christmas that the alleged bomber bungled the job. But that kind of good fortune is a sometime thing.

The next time, and there will be a next time, it may very well take a better imagination for what our enemies are capable of and judgment about how to interpret the information, that prevents a catastrophe al Qaida seeks to inflict on us. While it's good to be lucky, competence doesn't hurt.