Obama Discusses Security Fixes

Obama discusses fixes to security after attempted Christmas Day bombing.
Obama Discusses Security Fixes
President Barack Obama makes remarks on the attempted terror attack on Christmas Day, January 7, 2010 at the White House. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
1/7/2010
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/obama95631260.jpg" alt="President Barack Obama makes remarks on the attempted terror attack on Christmas Day, January 7, 2010 at the White House. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)" title="President Barack Obama makes remarks on the attempted terror attack on Christmas Day, January 7, 2010 at the White House. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1824156"/></a>
President Barack Obama makes remarks on the attempted terror attack on Christmas Day, January 7, 2010 at the White House. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Failing to disrupt the plan for the attempted Christmas Day attack on an airplane bound for Detroit resulted from a “failure to connect and understand the intelligence we already had,” President Obama said Thursday during a White House press conference. Obama’s comments coincided with the White House’s release of an unclassified security review of the Christmas Day bombing attempt.

President Obama said the review revealed three shortcomings. They included failure by the intelligence community to “aggressively follow up on and prioritize particular streams of intelligence” related to attacks on the United States. They also included a failure of analysis to “connect the dots” of intelligence across the intelligence community. The third shortcoming was the failure in the watch-listing system that allowed accused attacker Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the plane in Amsterdam.

In past statements, President Obama said that the failure was of a systematic nature, and that information the intelligence community had in its hands should have prevented the Christmas Day incident. Because information about Abdulmutallab’s extremist views was not effectively distributed, he did not end up on the no-fly lists.

President Obama spoke of four corrective steps that would be adopted by the intelligence community to “help our intelligence community do its job even better.”

First, he said clear lines of responsibility will be established for high-priority leads. Intelligence reports about possible attacks will be distributed more widely and more rapidly. He called for enhancements in information technology in order to better network attack intelligence with biographical information. Last, there will be a strengthening of procedures regarding how watch-list information is entered, analyzed, and acted upon.

The president also said he is instructing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with other nations to improve aviation screening and to use more-advanced explosive technology in screening, as well as imaging technology. Obama has also directed DHS to work with the Department of Energy and the country’s National Labs to “develop and deploy the next generation of screening technologies.”

Immediately following the incident, DHS “put additional screening measures into place—for all domestic and international flights—to ensure the continued safety of the traveling public,” said DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano in a statement on Dec. 26.

Additional reporting by Jack Phillips