Mike Ber's List: Los Angeles Times

• pledged
• to close gaps
• vowed
• floods
• early findings
• aimed at getting the tangle of government agencies
• assess
• in some cases, systemic problems, including a lack of interagency coordination, prevented key pieces of information from being shared or matched up.
• But in other cases, intelligence analysts simply didn't connect the disparate pieces of information already in their computer databases that could have flagged Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and stopped him from boarding Northwest Airlines Flight 253, according to officials familiar with the preliminary investigation.
  
• "No matter how good your software is or how good your procedures are, at the end of the day it comes back to people. And if people think that this is a 9-5 job and they're not filled with a sense of urgency every day, then you'll get these kinds of mistakes."
• Briefing reporters in Hawaii, a senior administration official said the various intelligence breakdowns identified so far are being addressed.
  
• and although officials at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., prepared a formal report on the father's information, it wasn't shared with the larger intelligence community until after the jet incident
• "Abdulmutallab's father didn't say his son was a terrorist, let alone planning an attack

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