President Barack Obama on Thursday accepted responsibility for intelligence shortcomings that led to a failed Christmas Day bombing plot on a Detroit-bound airliner, saying, “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,” Obama said.
Obama said an intelligence review found that the U.S. government had the information needed to thwart the plot but failed to do so because of a series of compounding shortcomings, including that intelligence analysts didn’t focus heavily enough on information warning that al-Qaida in Yemen wanted to strike the United States.
“The U.S. government had the information scattered through the system to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack. Rather than a failure to collect and share this intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence we already had,” Obama said at the White House.
The report also highlights other shortfalls, including that a misspelling of the suspect’s name initially resulted in State Department believing he did not have a valid U.S. visa. In addition, the report cites “a series of human errors,” including a delay in disseminating a finished intelligence report that would have shed light on the attempted plot.
Obama’s buck-stops-here message marks a change in tone from earlier statements in which Obama and other officials repeatedly noted that the watch-listing system that failed to flag the suspect, Umar AbdulMatallab, was put in place under the Bush administration. - Politico Story
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