Washington, January 07: Pressure was growing on President Barack Obama to shake up the US intelligence community with dismissals in the wake of not one but two humiliating and highly damaging debacles – the thwarted Christmas Day bombing and the slaughter in Afghanistan of seven CIA officers by an informant who was in fact a double agent.
Mr Obama’s statement on Tuesday expressing his anger at the failure of the intelligence community to “connect the dots” to disrupt the Christmas airliner incident has yet to quell criticism of how it was mishandled. So far he has not sought any resignations, but some in Washington are casting their eyes toward the Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, who claimed immediately afterwards that security arrangements had “worked”.
–Agencies