After a meeting with his national security advisers today, President Obama said the nation’s airline security system had “failed” to thwart the failed Christmas bombing of a Northwest flight.
Obama began by acknowledging the failure that resulted in the Christmas day attack: “When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way.”
He continued to describe the findings of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s initial review, before saying that “the bottom line is this: the U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas day attack. But our intelligence community failed to connect to those dots.”
“In other words,” he said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence. It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Obama continued:
I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed, or fully leveraged. That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.
“We have to do better. And we will do better,” he said.
The President also addressed the decision to halt the transfer of Yemeni detainees from Guantanamo Bay back to their home country. “Given the unsettled situation,” he said, “we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time. But make no mistake: We will close Guantanamo prison.”
Obama concluded: “We have to constantly adapt and evolve” in order to effectively fight al Qaeda, and “the margin for error is slim.”
