Washington, January 06: As new evidence emerges about the would-be bomber of a US passenger airliner on Christmas Day, US President Barack Obama has called for tough air security reforms.
Angry about the “potentially disastrous” US intelligence failures, Obama said on Tuesday that he wants initial reviews of the continuing probe of the Northwest Flight 253 attack, blamed on Al-Qaeda cells in Yemen, to be completed this week.
In a White House statement, he said he failed to understand why US intelligence agencies did not connect the dots and prevent Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up the Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day, even though they had enough information to do so.
Obama spoke in the Grand Foyer of the White House following a 90-minute meeting with senior intelligence officials responsible for aspects of national security and cabinet members.
“It is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged,” Obama said.
He added, “That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it,” and demanded immediate reforms to correct the problems.
He said US intelligence agencies knew that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula wanted to strike not only US targets in Yemen but in the United States itself.
In other words, the system failed “in a potentially disastrous way” when the suspected terrorist succeeded in boarding the plane with explosives, he stated.
“It’s my responsibility to find out why, and to correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future,” Obama said.
——-Agencies