US President Barack Obama scolded 20 of his highest-level officials on Tuesday over the botched Christmas Day terror attack on an airliner bound for Detroit, taking them jointly to task for “a screw-up that could have been disastrous” and that should have been avoided.
After the 90-minute private reckoning around a table in the super-secure White House Situation Room, a grim-faced Obama informed Americans that the government had enough information to thwart the attack ahead of time but that the intelligence community, though trained to do so, did not “connect those dots.”
“That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it,” he said, standing solo to address the issue publicly for the fifth time — and the first in Washington — since the Dec. 25 incident.
Afterward, the White House released quotes from the Situation Room session. Disclosing Obama’s words during a private meeting is normally strictly off-limits for this White House and most others before it. In this case, Obama advisers are eager to portray the president as aggressively on the job — even as he has little, or in this case nothing, new to announce about how to tackle the security lapses that allowed the airline plot to almost succeed.
Obama did not say who, if anyone, in the government might be held accountable.
Earlier in the day, White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president still has full confidence in his three top national security officials: National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano — all of whom were among those around the table with Obama later.
For now, administration officials say that Obama believes blame is shared and that no one agency or official appears clearly enough at fault to be fired. However, as the president and his team continue to identify what the security gaps were and how to fill them, Obama could determine that someone needs to go, said one senior administration official familiar with Obama’s thinking. The official spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter.
It was not clear how long that process of both accountability and policy changes might take, though Obama stressed urgency and speed in his public remarks.
“We will do better, and we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line,” he said.
A White House official said that Obama warned his lieutenants against looking for blame and that none of this sort of finger-pointing took place in the meeting, where the leaders of each agency took responsibility for failures within their respective organizations.
“While there will be a tendency for finger-pointing, I will not tolerate it,” the official quoted Obama as saying.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian suspect who allegedly tried to set off an explosive device aboard the plane as it came in for a landing in Detroit, has told US investigators he received training and instructions from al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Obama said on Tuesday he had suspended transfers of freed Guantanamo Bay inmates to Yemen following the Christmas Day attack, but also renewed his vow to close the notorious prison.
The administration is under pressure from domestic critics not to send more detainees back to Yemen, because of fears they will slip back into extremism.
His decision whipped up further uncertainty over his drive to close the detention center in Cuba. Obama had demanded the closure of the facility within a year of taking office, but the deadline will slip later this month.
“Given the unsettled situation, I’ve spoken to the attorney general and we’ve agreed that we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time,” Obama said in a televised statement.
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