Light at end of tunnel?

The most distressing aspect of an apparent al-Qaida operative’s attempt to blow up that Detroit-bound flight was how many aspects mirrored prior problems in the U.S. approach to terrorism.

Despite countless studies, major governmental changes and increased congressional scrutiny, U.S. intelligence agencies are still encountering some of the same internal problems that contributed to the government’s failure to act before the devastating 9/11 attacks more than eight years ago.

“It is eerily similar to what we saw in 9/11,” Eleanor Hill, staff director of the bipartisan commission that studied those attacks, said on MSNBC.

The good news is the way in which some things seem different.

Administration officials from President Barack Obama down are acknowledging — after an admittedly slow start — that things were not handled properly. Rather than grandstanding, their emphasis seems to be on fixing the problems. And despite predictable efforts of some Republicans to score political points, there are signs of an evolving bipartisan approach.

Plethora of clues

As with warnings preceding the 9/11 attacks, U.S. intelligence officials clearly failed to “connect the dots” when confronted with a plethora of clues that added up to the possibility of a new attack.

“There were a number of pieces that were out there, but for whatever reason, they weren’t brought together,” John Brennan, the government’s top counter-terrorism official, acknowledged Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

And as when shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight in December 2001, the president was on vacation and failed for several days to react.

Indeed, prematurely positive statements — notably Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s infamous “the system worked” — suggested the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, was mainly concerned with putting a positive face on its efforts.

That statement will rightfully dog Napolitano for some time. But bipartisan praise for her qualifications, including one from her Republican predecessor, Michael Chertoff, may offset efforts by all but the most partisan critics to liken it to President George W. Bush’s 2006 comment that his unqualified FEMA head Michael Brown was “doing a heckuva job.”

Besides, the principal problem appears to be within the intelligence community, though Obama was careful Tuesday to say “this was not a failure to collect intelligence” but “a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”

And while he has yet to say if heads will roll, such statements should help counter the negative perception resulting from his initial silence and the fact that, in acknowledging “a systematic failure” within the government, he undercut his own message by making it without television cameras.

Surprising omission

That was a surprising omission, given how well Obama’s campaign strategists understood the importance of atmospherics. But it bolstered the argument from GOP critics that the president does not fully grasp the terrorist threat.

Fortunately for Obama, his principal GOP critics have been former Vice President Dick Cheney, hardly a popular figure, and Sen. James DeMint, a paragon of partisanship. Besides, Republican criticism suffers from the contrast with the party’s record.

After all, Bush began the practice, continued by Obama until now, of sending terrorists from Guantanamo Bay to Yemen, where they became involved in planning such attacks as the one on the Detroit flight.

DeMint is blocking Obama’s nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration. And Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, led last year’s effort to bar TSA from using strip-search machines to enhance security with full-body scans of overseas airline passengers, though heavy majorities of both parties joined in the 310-118 vote.

X Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.