Obama orders vows to shake up security
Barack Obama said security lapses that led to a near-disaster in the Christmas Day attack on a US-bound airliner were not the fault of an individual or agency.
In an address from the White House yesterday, the US president suggested no one would be sacked, but vowed to correct the problems.
Mr Obama did not tell intelligence officials to dramatically change what they were doing, but told them to do it better and faster.
Clearly aware of the potential political fallout, he struck a tough tone towards the anti-terror fight, taking the rare step - for him - of calling it a "war".
In one concrete change, the US is adding more air marshals to flights. Hundreds of law enforcement officers from Homeland Security Department agencies are being trained and deployed to the Air Marshal Service, said a government official familiar with the strategy.
There are more than 4,000 federal air marshals but many times that number for domestic and international flights each day.
In the president's bleak assessment and a White House-released report about what went wrong, the US got an alarming picture of a post-September 11 debacle - an intelligence community that failed to understand what it had.
US intelligence officials had enough information to identify the suspect as an al-Qaida terrorist operative and keep him off a plane, but still could not identify and disrupt the plot and security measures did not catch him either.
Mr Obama announced about a dozen changes designed to remedy that, including new terror watch list guidelines, wider and quicker distribution of intelligence reports, stronger analysis of those reports, international partnerships and an inter-agency effort to develop next-generation airport screening technologies.
"It is appalling that we have not learned from our mistakes, eight years after the worst terror attacks in our nation's history," said Senator Olympia Snow, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will hold its first hearing on the subject on January 21, probably in private.
While Mr Obama promised improved security, his solutions were laced with bureaucratic reshuffling.
Americans might be surprised that the government was not already taking some of the steps Mr Obama ordered. For instance, he directed the intelligence community to begin assigning direct responsibility for following up leads on high-priority threats.
Mr Obama himself hinted at the difficulties of improving intelligence and security against a terrorist network that devises new methods as fast or faster than the US can come up with defences.
"There is, of course, no foolproof solution," he said. "We have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary."
He spoke from the White House, his remarks delayed twice as officials scrambled to declassify a six-page summary of a report he had ordered from top officials on the security failures.
That summary was released immediately after he spoke, as was Mr Obama's three-page directive to agency chiefs.
"When the system fails, it is my responsibility," he said.
"We are at war, we are at war against al-Qaida. We will do whatever it takes to defeat them."
The unclassified summary stated that US intelligence officials had received unspecified "discreet pieces of intelligence" to identify Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, as an al-Qaida operative and keep him off the flight from Amsterdam.
Officials received fragments of information as early as October, according to the report.
Earlier yesterday, the administration said Abdulmutallab was flagged for extra screening after he was already on the plane and heading for Detroit, Michigan.
The Department of Homeland Security said his potential ties to extremists came up in a routine check of passengers en route to the US - and not because of any suddenly gathered intelligence that emerged during the flight.
Although intelligence officials knew that an al-Qaida operative in Yemen posed a threat to US security, they did not increase their focus on that threat and did not pull together fragments of data needed to foil the scheme, said the summary.
According to the report, "a series of human errors" occurred, including a delay in the dissemination of a completed intelligence report and the failure of CIA and counter-terrorism officers to search all available databases for information that could have been tied to Abdulmutallab.
The former London student will appear in court today on six charges, including the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253.
