The report implicitly acknowledges all of this, saying that the system failed "to identify, correlate, and fuse into a coherent story all of the discrete pieces of intelligence held by the U.S. government" about both the Al Qaeda group and Mr. Abdulmutallab.
But throughout the investigation, the detectives had no access to the intelligence already held by the Met.
But these will be probably held by the respective intelligence Committees of the House and Senate – in other words, by bodies themselves complicit in the system.
All the men are being held by the Afghan intelligence service, the National Security Directorate.
The Chief Justice had also raised the issue of the number of political activists who have disappeared and are thought to be held by the state intelligence agencies.
"The voting lists are held by the SBU (the Ukrainian intelligence agency), " he explained.
A son of a former intelligence chief, Bahjat Suleiman, is a media mogul; the sugar monopoly is held by the son of Mustafa Tlass, a former long-serving defence minister.
The recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report and the hearings held by the Sept. 11 commission have demonstrated shortcomings in intelligence, Ms. Murphy said, and no-fly lists based on flawed intelligence would mean a security system "built on what right now appears to be a house of cards".
Blocking all communications in territory held by the militants, for example, could hamper U.S. collection of intelligence on their locations, operations and plans.
Held by the Library of Congress.
But Mr Williams said that he knows of at least 11,000 intelligence reports held on the force intelligence system that were earmarked for deletion but had not been removed.
