Link To White House National Security Review Report Documents
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Obama Points To Failures In Intelligence System
President Obama said Thursday that America's first line of defense is "timely, accurate" intelligence that is properly integrated.
"That's not what happened" before the attempted December 25 airplane bombing, he said.
Obama pointed out three failures in the nation's intelligence system that allowed a would-be bomber to board a U.S.-bound plane:
The intelligence community didn't aggressively follow up on information that it had that al Qaeda sought to strike the U.S.; there was a failure to "connect the dots" in the information; and shortcomings in the in the terror watch list system that didn't place him a no-fly list.
There was "a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had," Obama said.
The President said he had ordered four reforms:
First), he ordered the intelligence community to assign responsiblity to individuals to pursue leads on specific high-priority threats.
Second), intelligence reports will be distributed more widely and quickly.
Third), Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair will overhaul existing intelligence analytical efforts.
Fourth), the government will strengthen the criteria used to add people to no-fly list.
Obama also said he was directing the Homeland Security Department to improve international partnerships to boost screening at airports around the world. The Department of Energy will work to develop better screening technology, he said.
Obama said he was establishing accountability reviews for agencies. His national security adviser, John Brennan, will report to him every 30 days on the reviews, he said.
There is "no silver bullet" to securing all flights coming into America every day, Obama warned.
He spoke of his "solemn responsibility" to keep the nation secure. "Ultimately, the buck stops with me."
But Obama is not planning to fire anyone for the foul-up, a senior administration official said.
The official said the president believes that previous administrations would "play hide the ball" and not come clean with the American people when things go wrong, so he wants to be direct about what needs to be fixed, but the official said the president does not want this process to devolve into finger-pointing.
Pressed on whether people in the administration are likely to be fired to follow through on Obama's promise last week to bring "accountability" to all levels of government, the senior administration official said no.
"It's about holding accountable a system so that it works," said the senior official.
Another U.S. official briefed on the investigation said federal agents flagged the name of the suspect in the botched Christmas Day terrorist attack while his plane was headed from the Netherlands to the United States and were planning to question him at the Detroit airport.
The source said agents with Customs and Border Protection officials "analyzed the database" as is their practice when the plane was in the air and were ready "to meet" and interview Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab when his plane arrived.
Also, an Obama administration official said Customs and Border Protection followed its normal procedures as it prepared for arriving passengers, and by doing so, it accessed the suspect's record in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database.
The White House is pushing back on an Los Angeles Times report published Wednesday saying U.S. border security officials became aware of the suspect's alleged extremist ties while he was en route.
"As we have indicated before, there were bits and pieces of information about AbdulMutallab available in a variety of areas in the system prior to December 25. There was no new information that emerged when the plane was in the air," an administration official said.
Today the White House plans to release an unclassified report by John Brennan, the assistant to the president on homeland security and Counter Terrorism, detailing what went wrong and also to reveal new steps intended to thwart future attacks.
Since the attempted attack, the intelligence community has scrubbed the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, which has more than 500,000 suspects, adding people to U.S. watch lists and no-fly lists as a result.
Officials would not have pulled AbdulMutallab aside for a secondary screening or prevented him from flying in Amsterdam because he was not on the no-fly or terror watch lists, the administration source said.
Obama has demanded to know why the suspect was allowed on the plane, given the information available.
"This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous," Obama told his national security team Tuesday, according to a senior administration official. "We dodged a bullet, but just barely."
According to authorities, AbdulMutallab tried to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear as a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam made its final approach to Detroit. The device failed to fully detonate, instead setting off a fire at the man's seat.
Obama said he wants immediate reforms to correct what he called systemic failures that allowed the attack to happen.
Americans will feel "a certain shock" after reading Thursday's report on the missed warning signs, White House National Security Adviser James Jones told USA Today.
"We know what happened, we know what didn't happen, and we know how to fix it," Jones said. "That should be an encouraging aspect. We don't have to reinvent anything to make sure it doesn't happen again."
John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence, said it's always easier to piece things together in retrospect.
"There's always a lot of noise in the system, and then you've got to sort out from that noise the signals that are really important. And sometimes, we fail to do that," he said on CNN's "American Morning."
"My suspicion in this case is that there wasn't necessarily that much information and that there was quite a bit of ambiguity in whatever was available. In retrospect, it probably looks like we should have been able to figure out what happened," he said.
Negroponte said that what interests him is whether the attempted attack is a part of a larger plot.
"I think the important thing right now is that we get as much information from his as we can," he said.
AbdulMutallab is scheduled to make his first court appearance Friday.
On Wednesday, a Federal Grand Jury indicted him on charges of:
Attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction; attempted murder within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States;
Willful attempt to destroy and wreck an aircraft within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States;
Willfully placing a destructive device in, upon and in proximity to an aircraft within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States;
and Two counts of possession of a firearm/destructive in furtherance of a crime of violence.
Mostly Republican critics have said AbdulMutallab should have been subjected to military interrogation rather than receiving the rights of a defendant in the U.S. criminal justice system.
Sources: CNN, MSNBC
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