Obama Releases Report On Attempted Plane Bombing

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.

MICHELE NORRIS, host:

And I'm Michele Norris.

President Obama says the U.S. must do a better job at keeping dangerous people off airplanes. The president spoke this afternoon as the administration was releasing a preliminary report. It outlines intelligence failures that allowed the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airline's jet. Mr. Obama took responsibility for the failure to prevent the attack.

President BARACK OBAMA: Ultimately, the buck stops with me. As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility.

NORRIS: The president promised immediate steps to improve the intelligence process. In a moment, we'll talk with a leading member of the president's national security team.

First, here's NPR's White House Correspondent Don Gonyea with us here in the studio. Don, tell us what the president had to say about what went wrong.

DON GONYEA: Well, he said that the shortcomings occurred in three, what he called, broad and compounding ways. First, he said, we knew a lot about the al-Qaida in Yemen, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula - that group, and that they have been growing and that they have been active. And, he said, we knew that they - there was a lot of chatter, a lot of intel that they planned on some sort of strike against the U.S. But, he said, the intelligence agencies did not adequately follow up on the streams of intelligence that were coming in. So, that was the first part of it.

The second part of it, he said, that failure to analyze and that failure to connect the dots should have, would have led them to Abdulmutallab, and that this person planned some sort of an attack. Finally, he said, all of this resulted in him not being put on a specific no-fly list that would have kept him off that Amsterdam-to-Detroit plane on Christmas Day.

NORRIS: So, what specific fixes is the president planning to put in place?

GONYEA: Well, here's what he says. He says it's not so much a failure to collect intel - it is a failure to analyze it, to know what it is, to understand it, to share what we had. Really, it's that issue of dots not being connected. So, he said that from the intelligence side of things, all leads must be assigned to analysts. And they must be followed with clear lines of responsibility and authority until they are resolved. He said that didn't happen here. He said threats to the U.S. have to be distributed more widely between agencies.

The analytical process has to be strengthened so that the intel they do receive can be sifted and sorted in far more meaningful ways. And that no-fly list has to be more effective. Now, he also said, again, there is no silver bullet to protecting, you know, the thousands of flights that come in and out around the country and into the country, but he said we can spend more money, we will on investment into explosive detection devices that would have caught the kind of thing that this would-be bomber had.

NORRIS: President Obama also spoke about taking personal responsibility for what went wrong. What exactly does that mean and will he hold others responsible? Is anyone likely to be disciplined?

GONYEA: The personal responsibility is that, as he put it, the buck stops here, that a lot of people were waiting for him to say. But he said he will hold each of his agency directors responsible as this moves forward. He expects these things to be fixed. It will be measurable and if there are shortcomings, then people will be held responsible.

But in this particular case, he said, quote, "I'm less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning what happened and preventing these mistakes." This one, ultimately, he said, was more of a systemic thing than it was any one person. But look for him to be watching individuals in the future.

NORRIS: Don Gonyea, thanks so much.

GONYEA: Pleasure.

NORRIS: That's NPR's White House correspondent Don Gonyea.

MICHELE NORRIS, host:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

And I'm Melissa Block.

President Obama says the U.S. must do better at keeping dangerous people off airplanes. The president spoke this afternoon as the administration was releasing a preliminary report. It outlines intelligence failures that allowed the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airline's jet. Mr. Obama took responsibility for the failure to prevent the attack.

President BARACK OBAMA: Ultimately, the buck stops with me. As president I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people. And when the system fails, it is my responsibility.

NORRIS: The president promised immediate steps to improve the intelligence process. In a moment, we'll talk with a leading member of the president's national security team. First, we're joined by NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley. And, Scott, the way President Obama framed this was that there was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to connect the intelligence that was gathered. What does he mean?

SCOTT HORSLEY: Well, he means the information that was in the government's possession somehow fell through the cracks. For example, the government knew that the suspected bomber, in this case, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was in Yemen, that he had fallen under the influence of extremists there. They knew that al-Qaida operatives in Yemen were working with a Nigerian to carry out an attack. But they didn't put all those pieces of information together.

Now, the White House is drawing a distinction between this and the old pre-9/11 problem, where the CIA didn't talk to the National Security Agency, that sort of thing. In this case, the different agencies were talking to each other, but this particular threat wasn't given a high priority. So, the leads were not aggressively chased down.

NORRIS: Now, the president has said that the U.S. dodged a bullet on Christmas Day with this attempted bombing. What specific fixes did he outline today?

HORSLEY: Well, one of the fixes is that someone should have specific responsibility for chasing down those high priority threats. In this case, it was sort of everybody's job, so, it was nobody's job. One of the things they want to have is specific responsibility to make sure that leads are followed up on - not just most of the time, the president said, but all the time.

They're also going to be taking another look at how watch lists are put together, especially the no-fly list that would've kept Abdulmutallab off the airplane. The president says even the best intelligence isn't always going to identify terrorist suspects ahead of time. So they're also talking about beefing up airport security both here and abroad. That might mean additional pat downs. That might mean more explosive sniffing dogs.

Even before this incident there were plans in place to install another 300 full-body scanners around the country. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says now we may see more of those. Although she stresses that this isn't really about one piece of equipment or one kind of technology that's going to be the silver bullet. Instead, she's talking about using multiple layers of security.

NORRIS: Now, when the president said, as he did, the buck stops with me, by extension, no one was fired, at least not today.

HORSLEY: That's right. The president has said this was not the fault of one person or one agency, but rather, a systemic problem. That's not to say there weren't some human errors here. For example, we've learned now that a misspelling of Abdulmutallab's name led the State Department to initially think he didn't have a U.S. visa, when of course he did. There were some incomplete searches of databases that might've uncovered more information had they been done properly.

But Mr. Obama says he's more concerned with learning from this incident and improving the system than getting somebody's scalp.

NORRIS: NPR's White House correspondent Scott Horsley. Scott, thanks very much.

HORSLEY: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.