President Barack Obama took ultimate responsibility last night for security lapses that allowed the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner and ordered reforms aimed at thwarting future attacks.
Obama outlined the new steps, including tightened passenger screening and expanded terrorism watchlists, as the White House released a declassified account of what went wrong leading up to the Dec. 25 incident in which a Nigerian man allegedly came close to blowing up a flight from Amsterdam.
With an eye to the potential political fallout over his administration's response, Obama again sought to reassure Americans he was doing everything possible to fix intelligence faults and beef up security to prevent further attacks.
"I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer. For ultimately the buck stops with me," Obama said at the White House. "As president I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility."
Addressing Americans about the near-disaster for the second time in three days, Obama said he was ordering implementation of reforms to plug the security gaps exposed by the attempted bombing, including wider distribution of intelligence and expanded use of body-scanning technology at airports.
The White House report ordered by Obama detailed how spy agencies failed to connect the dots and head off the attempted bombing, which authorities have blamed on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, who has been linked to a Yemen-based branch of al Qaeda.
Abdulmutallab will be arraigned on Friday afternoon in federal court in downtown Detroit, about 25 miles (40 km) from the airport where he was taken into custody by FBI agents on Christmas Day.
Abdulmutallab, who will enter a plea at the hearing, faces six federal counts, including attempted murder and the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, that could bring a sentence of life in prison.
By releasing the review, Obama may be seeking not only to assuage public safety concerns but minimize political damage to his administration before expected congressional committee hearings on the attempted attack.
Republicans have sought to paint the Democratic president as weak on national security issues, hoping to score political points in a midterm election year. Obama had already acknowledged a security "screw-up" in the incident.
"I worry that the president's preoccupation with healthcare and other domestic issues has distracted him from what should be the fundamental role of our chief executive: keeping our nation and its citizenry safe from harm," Republican Senator John Cornyn said.
With Obama just back this week from his Hawaiian vacation, counterterrorism has jumped to the top of his agenda, forcing him into a juggling act with other pressing priorities. The White House insists he is not being distracted from tackling double-digit unemployment and overhauling healthcare.
PRESSURE ON INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY
In his latest appearance, Obama kept up pressure on the intelligence community, which he said failed "to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had" that would have uncovered the Christmas Day bomb plot.
The would-be bomber managed to slip through a security apparatus that was supposed to detect such plots since sweeping changes were implemented after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked-plane attacks on the United States.
"Although our intelligence community had learned a great deal about the al Qaida affiliate in Yemen, called al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, that we knew that they sought to strike the United States and that they were recruiting operatives to do so, the intelligence community did not aggressively follow up on and prioritize particular streams of intelligence," Obama said.
Abdulmutallab's name was in a database of about 550,000 with suspected terrorist ties but was never added to a no-fly list of several thousand people despite information gathered about him.
Among the intelligence lapses was the fact Abdulmutallab's father had gone to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and told officials his son had taken up radical views.
A top Yemeni official said yesterday that Abdulmutallab was recruited by al Qaeda in London and met a radical American Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen. Awlaki has been linked to the gunman charged with killing 13 people at the Fort Hood army base in Texas in November.
An administration official said Customs and Border Protection officers had planned to question Abdulmutallab on arrival in Detroit after finding a record about him in an intelligence database once the plane was airborne. But the official stressed the available information would not have been enough to keep him from boarding the flight in Amsterdam.
Obama ordered measures aimed at improving the collection, sharing and analyzing of intelligence and at lowering the threshold for "keeping dangerous people off airplanes."
"I'm ordering an immediate effort to strengthen the criteria used to add individuals to our terrorist watchlists, especially the no-fly list," he said.
Obama insisted, however, that "we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices" America's open society.
Janet Napolitano, U.S. homeland security chief, said she would go to Spain this month to meet allies and seek tougher international aviation security standards and also said 300 more advanced imaging scanners would be deployed at U.S. airports in 2010.