President orders agencies to take new security steps

A White House review of security failures surrounding the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound commercial airliner found agencies had plenty of indicators that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab posed a serious security threat, but failed to understand the importance of what information they had.

"The U.S. government had the information -- scattered throughout the system -- to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack," President Obama said during a White House briefing Thursday when he released an unclassified summary of the findings. "Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had."

Shortcomings occurred in three broad and compounding ways, Obama said. First, although the intelligence community knew the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen -- called al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula -- sought to strike the United States and was recruiting operatives to do so, it did not aggressively follow up on and prioritize streams of intelligence related to a possible attack.

That oversight contributed to a failure of analysts to connect pieces of information scattered across the intelligence community that, together, could have revealed Abdulmutallab was planning an attack. And that in turn "fed into shortcomings in the watch-listing system which resulted in this person not being placed on the no fly list, thereby allowing him to board that plane in Amsterdam for Detroit," Obama said.

Obama issued a directive ordering the intelligence community to immediately begin assigning specific responsibility for investigating all leads on high-priority threats.

"We must follow the leads that we get. And we must pursue them until plots are disrupted. And that means assigning clear lines of responsibility," he said.

The president also ordered wider and more rapid distribution of intelligence reports, and required Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair to take steps to strengthen how analysts process and integrate intelligence. Obama charged his Intelligence Advisory Board with the long-term challenge of figuring out how agencies can better sift through vast amounts of intelligence and data.

"Finally, I'm ordering an immediate effort to strengthen the criteria used to add individuals to our terrorist watch lists, especially the no fly list," Obama said. "We must do better in keeping dangerous people off airplanes, while still facilitating air travel."

National Security Advisor and retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Jones told USA Today on Wednesday that the review's findings would "shock" most Americans. Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan led the investigation.

"This was not the failure of a single individual or organization," Brennan said on Thursday. "Yes, there were human errors. But those errors were not the primary cause of what happened on Dec. 25." Instead, systemic failures allowed Abdulmutallab to board a commercial aircraft with explosives sewn into his underwear, he said.

Administration critics have called for Obama to fire one or more top officials for the failures. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was widely denounced when she claimed "the system worked" in her initial public comments following the Dec. 25 incident. She quickly recast that assessment, explaining on a number of broadcast news programs that the system clearly failed.

Napolitano said Thursday the department would take immediate steps to improve airport screening. Over the next year, 300 new screening machines using advanced imaging technology are to be deployed, in addition to the 40 that already exist in domestic airports, she said.

Other officials have been criticized as well: Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center since 2007, continued his Colorado ski vacation after the incident to the consternation of some colleagues and despite the center's role in the failure of intelligence agencies to heed multiple red flags surrounding Abdulmutallab's actions and behavior, according to a New York Daily News report on Thursday.

Brennan defended Leiter during the briefing and said he had offered to cancel his vacation, but that Brennan rejected the offer because Leiter needed his "well-deserved break."

Obama said he would hold staff accountable for implementing his orders and for correcting the failures that led to the thwarted attack.

"At this stage in the review process it appears that this incident was not the fault of a single individual or organization, but rather a systemic failure across organizations and agencies" he said. "That's why, in addition to the corrective efforts that I've ordered, I've directed agency heads to establish internal accountability reviews, and directed my national security staff to monitor their efforts. We will measure progress.

"Moreover, I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer," he said.

The Justice Department on Wednesday charged Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, with six criminal counts, including attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempted murder. If convicted, he faces life in prison.