国际英语新闻：U.S. intelligence community knows of al-Qaeda's attack plot on Christmas: TV

WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. intelligence community knew of al-Qaeda's plot to bomb an U.S. flight on the Christmas, but it could not pinpoint the terrorist group's target out of flooding information before Dec. 25, according to a TV report on Wednesday.

This picture shows Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on the runway after arriving at Detroit Metropolitan Airport from Amsterdam on Friday, Dec. 25, 2009. A passenger aboard the plane set off firecrackers Friday, causing a commotion and some minor injuries, a Delta official said

The CBS news report cited an a high-ranking counterterrorism official as saying that despite knowledge of a "Christmas surprise" al-Qaeda threatened to make, the U.S. intelligence agencies were not able to piece together the details in time to prevent the attempted bombing of a Delta/Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to Detroit, Michigan.

    "We'd been tracking this stuff for months, without being able to connect the dots of what was happening, and what was going to happen," said the official. " The problem is they get 8,000 messages a day, but we couldn't come up with something that was credible."

    The official attributed the failure to "how smart our enemy is," saying that as al-Qaeda is recruiting across a wider and wide spectrum, "it is becoming more and more" difficult to profile terrorist suspects.

    "We're looking for any young Arab Muslim men between 21 and 40, but they know that as well, so they're actively recruiting folks outside that spectrum," he added.

    A 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is son of a prominent banker and graduate of a known British college, attempted to ignite an explosive device attached to his body on the flight.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect in the Detroit bound Delta Airlines plane on Christmas day, is shown in this undated photograph released to Reuters on December 26, 2009

Last month, his father reported to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria about his son's radical thoughts and potential attack against the United State. Abdulmutallab's name was added to a terrorist watch list but not on the "no-fly" list.

A slightly charred and singed underpants with the explosive packet removed from the crotch is seen in government photos obtained exclusively by ABC News, released to Reuters, Dec. 28, 2009