Texas congressman gets inside story on attempted airliner bombing

A Houston-area congressman given an in-depth briefing on the attempted Christmas Day airliner bombing over Detroit says the episode shows al-Qaida linked terrorists have detected a crack in the nation's airline security system that could be exploited again.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, a former counterterrorism official with the Justice Department, says his "biggest concern in the next couple of weeks is the fact that they have identified vulnerability, they know we have a weakness and they will continue to exploit it on future flights."

McCaul added: "We don't know how many more individuals are still out there that were trained by this radical cleric in Yemen and may be still trying to pull off the same stunt."

McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee's panel on intelligence, was briefed on Wednesday by senior intelligence officials on their investigation into the failures that enabled the bombing suspect to board a U.S.-bound jetliner.

McCaul said the briefing shows that State Department officials failed to revoke the U.S. visa of bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he boarded his Dec. 25 flight from Amsterdam. The suspect had no luggage and no coat, even though he was headed to wintry Detroit.

The State Department's failure to revoke the visa was a "fundamental error in this case," McCauls said. "The fact that the State Department didn't revoke his visa is inexcusable and I think that people need to be held accountable for this serious error."

Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a member of the House Intelligence Committee that was briefed by national intelligence director Dennis Blair and national counterterrorism center director Michael Leiter told reporters that the terrorist threat was even greater than he had imagined.

"There were more dots crying out to be connected than I realized,'' Holt said. "If any two of the dots were connected, it would have moved the organization to quickly connect the other dots.''

Lawmakers were told that the National Security Agency had picked up a discussion in Yemen in October that a Nigerian was being trained for a special mission. The suspect is Nigerian.

A month later, the suspect's father, a prominent banker in Nigeria, met with the CIA station chief in Nigeria to express concerns about the Islamic radicalization of his son.

A third signal was missed when the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria misspelled the suspect's name, allowing State Department officials to believe that he did not have a U.S. visa when in fact he did.

The nation's defensive perimeter "shouldn't get stymied by a single misspelling,'' Holt said. "If you mistype something in Google, Google comes back and says maybe you want to look at this other spelling.''

Abdulmutallab stands accused of trying to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253, with nearly 300 people, by detonating explosives concealed in his underwear.

He has pleaded not guilty to a six-count indictment that could lead to life in prison without parole, if convicted.