Kaneohe: President Barack Obama on Tuesday blamed a combination of "human and systemic failures" for allowing the botched Christmas Day attack aboard a Detroit-bound US airliner, in his first big test on homeland security.
Interrupting a vacation in Hawaii for the second straight day to reassure Americans that he will keep the United States safe, Obama listed several safeguards that failed to prevent a 23-year-old Islamic militant from Nigeria from smuggling explosives onto a plane to the United States.
"When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been so that this extremist boards a plane with dangerous explosives that could cost nearly 300 lives, a systemic failure has occurred. And I consider that totally unacceptable," Obama said at a Marine Corps base near his vacation home.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the suspect who claims to have been trained by al-Qaeda in Yemen, is accused of trying to ignite explosives sewn inside his underwear on Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam as it approached Detroit. He was subdued by passengers and crew.
Republicans have criticized what they see as the Obama administration's failures in preventing such an attack as well as the president's decision to remain silent in the days after Friday's incident.
A senior administration official told reporters in Hawaii there was some link between al-Qaeda and the attempted attack, according to new information that prompted Tuesday's presidential statement.
"There were bits of information available within the intelligence community that could have and should have been pieced together," Obama said.
"What is apparent was that there was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security," he added.
Obama said he has asked to hear preliminary findings by Thursday on reviews he ordered after the incident on the way the United States places people on a "terrorist watch list" and on US air travel screening procedures.
Suspect's father
Abdulmutallab's father had warned US officials weeks ago that his son had adopted extremist views.
CNN reported that the father, a prominent Nigerian banker, met in Nigeria with a CIA official. But the network, citing an unidentified source, said that official's report on the meeting was not disseminated by CIA headquarters in the United States.
"It's been widely reported that the father of the suspect in the Christmas incident warned US officials in Africa about his son's extremist views," Obama said. "It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect's name on a no-fly list."
A CIA spokesman said the agency learned of Abdulmutallab in November, when his father came to the US Embassy in Nigeria and sought help in finding him. The CIA said it worked with the embassy to add him and his possible Yemeni contacts to the US terrorism database and forwarded biographical information about him to the National Counterterrorism Center.
The CIA defended its handling of the information, saying the center was set up "to connect the dots on terrorism."
The failed attack, the most serious such incident in the United States since he took office in January, has put Obama on the defensive over domestic security. It has forced communication missteps by his administration, and drawn attention away from his top legislative priority, healthcare reform.
By going before the television cameras twice in two days, he sought to counter any impression that his vacation took precedence over national security.
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The admission of failures in this incident also recalls a pledge to do things differently than his predecessor, Republican George W Bush, whom Democrat Obama criticized during last year's presidential campaign for being slow in owning up to mistakes and, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, in recognizing the scale of the challenge.
"We need to learn from this episode and act quickly to fix the flaws in our system because our security is at stake and lives are at stake," Obama said.
Technology may be part of the solution.
Abdulmutallab smuggled the explosives in his underpants through checkpoints in Lagos and Amsterdam and hyper-sensitive body scanners might have prevented this from happening. But the machines are expensive and also intrusive, exposing an image of the naked body on a security viewing screen.
Beefed up airport security affected the stock markets on Tuesday, with the shares of Air Canada and WestJet Airlines Ltd, Canada's two biggest airlines, declining after they warned US -bound travelers to expect more flight delays and cancellations.
A wing of al-Qaeda based in Yemen said it was behind the failed bombing to avenge US attacks on the group, according to a web statement.
The Yemeni government, which is fighting Shi'ite rebels in the north and faces separatist sentiment in the south, said the country could be home to up to 300 al-Qaeda militants, some of whom may be planning attacks on the West.
US and Yemeni officials are looking at fresh targets in case Obama orders a retaliatory strike in Yemen, CNN reported, citing two unidentified American officials.
Yemen has been a long-standing base of support for al-Qaeda. Militants bombed the Navy warship USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000, killing 17 US sailors, and Yemenis were one of the largest groups to train in al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan before September 11, 2001 attacks.
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