原创 Obama declares attempt on airline was intelligence

President Barack Obama www.apidnr.com.hk declared Tuesday that there was a deep failure of national intelligence in the botched Christmas Day airliner terror attack over Detroit, telling the nation that the government had enough information to thwart potential disaster but could not "connect those dots."

Speaking after a meeting with his security team, Obama said there had been even more "red flags" than had already been acknowledged: that an al Qaeda affiliate in the Arabian Peninsula planned to strike the United States and that it was working with the man who ended up accused of trying to blow up a plane with nearly 300 passengers and crew aboard.

"The information was there," Obama said, blistering agencies and analysts for not figuring out the threat — but without singling out any by name.

"I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect," Obama said. "But it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it."

Obama never said who, if anyone, in the government might be held accountable, and the White House would not say whether any officials would be fired.

The president’s analysis is centered on identifying security gaps and filling them.

In the course of that, he will determine whether anyone will lose a job, said one senior administration official familiar with Obama’s thinking.

Obama announced no new steps to improve the intelligence or security systems.

But he promised that they would be coming, signaling more changes for airport travelers and in the sharing of intelligence.

Since the attack, the government has added dozens of names to its lists of suspected terrorists and those barred from flights bound for the United States.

People on the watch list are subject to additional scrutiny before they are allowed to enter this country, while anyone on the no-fly list is barred from boarding aircraft in or headed for the United States.

And the Transportation Security Administration directed airlines, beginning Monday, to give full-body, pat-down searches to U.S.-bound travelers from Yemen, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and 11 other countries.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian suspect who allegedly tried to set off an explosive device aboard the plane as it came in for a landing in Detroit, has told U.S. investigators that he received training and instructions from al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.

His father warned the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria that his son had drifted into extremism in Yemen, but that threat was never fully digested by the U.S. security apparatus.

"When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way," Obama said. "And it’s my responsibility to find out why and to correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future."

"We have to do better, and we will do better. And we will do it quickly," he said."

In his remarks to the nation, Obama told reporters that the security lapse didn’t have to do with the collection of information but with the failure to integrate and analyze what was there.

The bottom line, he said was that the government had "sufficient information to uncover this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack."

"Our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list," he said. "This was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already have."

Obama said it is clear that the government knew that the suspect had joined with extremists in Yemen.

Abdulmutallab remains in federal custody, charged with trying to destroy the Northwest Airlines flight.

He is alleged to have smuggled an explosive device onboard and set if off. The device sparked only a fire.