Following the president’s comments, CBS News correspondent Bob Orr said “screening is going to be more invasive
by Brian Montopoli
President Obama said this afternoon that government officials “had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt” the Christmas Day terror plot but “failed to connect [the] dots” that would have allowed them to do so.
“This was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had,” he said.
Following a 90-minute meeting with officials investigating how a Nigerian national with possible al Qaeda links was able to board a Detroit-bound airliner with an explosive device, Mr. Obama said “it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged.”
Mr. Obama said the intelligence community knew al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula wanted to strike the United States and that they were working with the individual who turned out to be the Christmas Day bomber.
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He called the performance by the intelligence community “not acceptable.”
“I will not tolerate it,” said the president.
“When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way,” said the president. “And it is my responsibility to find out why, and to correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future.”
Mr. Obama also discussed steps already taken to improve security, including updating terror watch list system, adding more air marshals, and giving full-body searches to U.S.-bound travelers from certain countries.
He said that “while our review has found that our watch-listing system is not broken, the failure to add Abdulmutallab to the no-fly list shows that this system needs to be strengthened.”
The president had already blamed “systematic failures” for allowing 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the airliner with the explosive device, which failed to fully detonate.
Abdulmutallab was on a federal list of more than 500,000 suspected terrorists, but he was not on no-fly or additional screening watch list despite numerous red flags having been raised about him.
Following the president’s comments, CBS News correspondent Bob Orr said “screening is going to be more invasive, it’s going to be more expensive, and travelers should get used to the idea that the system will be slower.”
Aftermath News 
