The bungled response that allowed a suspected bomber onto an airliner exposes persistent holes in US security operations despite the post-September 11 revamp, officials and experts say.
The father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab raised concerns about his son's radicalism to the US embassy in Nigeria yet the 23-year-old was still able to board a Detroit-bound plane he allegedly tried to blow up on Christmas Day.
President Barack Obama, who has faced growing criticism from Republicans over the plot, said that he found that lack of coordination "totally unacceptable."
"There was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security," Obama said Tuesday on his vacation in Hawaii.
Obama said that the father's information was passed along weeks ago to "a component of our intelligence community" but that it was not distributed to get the suspect's name on a no-fly list.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department both said they passed information gleaned from the father to the National Counterterrorism Center, a database of suspicious individuals set up after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
"If somebody thinks the dots could have been connected better in this case, they know where to go for answers," a US intelligence official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The official signaled that the case was not clear-cut before the bombing bid, saying that the father was seeking help finding his son who was until then unknown to intelligence agencies.
{{/usCountry}}The official signaled that the case was not clear-cut before the bombing bid, saying that the father was seeking help finding his son who was until then unknown to intelligence agencies.
{{/usCountry}}"I'm not aware of any smoking gun piece of intelligence -- somehow withheld -- that would have automatically put Abdulmutallab on the selectee or no-fly lists," he said.
The US embassy in London, where Abdulmutallab was studying, issued him a two-year multiple-entry tourist visa in June 2008, a State Department official said.
But the official said that the State Department could not revoke visas due to security concerns and instead referred the father's concerns about Abdulmutallab to the National Counterterrorism Center.
James Jay Carafano, an expert on national security at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said it was too easy to blame systematic problems and that the key was to find ways for intelligence operatives to assess data.
"This blame-the-system thing is a bit of a cop-out. It makes it sound like it's some kind of mechanical process and if we just make some policy changes, this will all go away," he said.
"It's really a leadership issue," he said. "People don't want to do things. Information gets pumped into the National Counterterrorism Center and they say, 'Okay, this doesn't mean much to us,' and they shove it."
The center, which as of early this year had 500,000 people on its watchlist, was established in 2004 as part of the vast reorganization of the intelligence apparatus under then president George W. Bush.
The Bush administration consolidated 16 intelligence agencies under a newly powerful director of national intelligence and created a Department of Homeland Security.
But turf wars have been scarcely hidden. The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that the White House issued a classified order this month rejecting a bid by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair to exercise more control over the Central Intelligence Agency, the highest-profile spy body.
Jack Rice, a former CIA officer and media commentator, said that the lack of coordination in identifying Abdulmutallab showed how little had changed since the revamp of intelligence services.
"After hundreds of billions of dollars, we still seem incapable of synthesizing information. What a disaster this is," he said.