Closed captioning of: Cleric 'talking a lot' with bombing suspect
>>>
president obama
says he hopes to know next tuesday about the government's missteps that may have contributed to not being able to put together all the information about the attempted airline attack on christmas day. the president is already reviewing some preliminary reports he requested from home lapped securi land security officials. the investigation may lead to some changes in the administration's anti-terror policies. what can we expect next week, and what's happening in the interim?
pete williams
joins us live. what are the agencies doing to prepare for next week is this.
>>
still going through material in their files to see what they might have missed about warning signs that could have suggested that there was a lot in the works. one of the things that's emerging, we're told, david, is a much clearer idea this radical cleric, al awlaki, was talking a lot to the suspect in the case, umar farouk abdulmutallab. still not certain whether they had a face-to-face meeting but quite clear that they were communicating regularly. and what this is according to the intel analysts i talked about is -- or talked to, rather, he's gone beyond merely being a cleric, merely sort of blessing things that are brought to him and getting much more involved earlier on in the process, helping to design and orchestrate these attacks so they find that very disturbing. obviously he's been the target of attacks in yemen. it was thought that he was killed the day before christmas. that appears not to be the case.
>>
al awlaki grew up in the
united states
, presumably still has a lot of contacts here. would that be part of the focus by the
homeland security department
?
>>
without question. really the
intelligence agencies
are trying to follow up. they got on to him a year ago because of the communications that he was having with hasan but they focused much more intensively on him. it appears that yemeni officials themselves have actually gathered much of the intelligence on him doing some fairly aggressive monitoring of his communications.
>>
throw a little bit of a curveball at you and that is i think it was a year or two ago when congress essentially voted against this billion-
dollar bill
that would have put in some of these imaging devices in airports and there was a great
hue and cry
about privacy issues. do you get a sense that is shifting now because of this?
>>
well, it was a house vote in june. the house voted 3-1 basically to say you can cannot use these full body imaging machines on what's called primary screenings. you can't require everyone to go through them, the house said. you can only use them in secondary screenings. if there's some reason to think someone should go through additional screenings, then you can put them through the full body imagers and the
department of homeland security
took that as a sign. we'll see if congress changes its mind. i can guarantee you that the
privacy rights
groups still fervently believe that it's wrong to put all passengers through these machines. they say why put millions of americans through these if there's no reason to suspect that they might be doing anything wrong. they say put the reliance on intelligence. but the other side says, well, you can't be sure the intelligence is going to capture everybody. certainly abdulmutallab didn't show up on any intel list. you have to put everybody through them. we'll see a much more vigorous debate. today the
prime minister of the uk
,
gordon brown
, said we ought to look at putting these in airports in the uk.
>>
interesting stuff. pete, thanks. i appreciate it. good to see
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