President Barack Obama said he won't tolerate more intelligence lapses like those that led to an alleged bomber boarding a Northwest .
President Barack Obama said he won't tolerate more intelligence lapses like those that led to an alleged bomber boarding a Northwest .
President Barack Obama delivered a statement at the White House Tuesday following his meeting with his national security team and his administration's review of how U.S. counterterrorism and homeland security missteps led to the Christmas Day bombing attempt of a Northwest Airlines jet.
Obama squarely blamed his intelligence and homeland-security officials for their failure to connect the dots of intelligence they possessed. He indicated he wouldn't tolerate such failures again.
Obama said:
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 those dots which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list.
In otherwords, this was not a failure to collect intelligence. It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we already had. The information was there. Agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it. Professionals were trained to look for it and to bring it all together. Now I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect. But it is increasingly clear that intelligence was ot fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That's not acceptable and I will not tolerate it.
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