Obama says no individual or agency

Tuesday, 12 January 2010 06:46

President Barack Obama said Thursday security lapses that led to a near-disaster in the Christmas Day attack on a U.S.-bound airliner were not the fault of a single individual or agency and suggested no one would be fired. He vowed the problems would be corrected.

Obama did not tell intelligence officials to dramatically change what they are doing. Instead, he told them to do it better, and faster. He left it to them to figure out how. Clearly aware of the potential political fallout, Obama struck a tough tone toward the anti-terror fight, taking the rare step - for him - of calling it a "war."

In one concrete change, the administration is adding more air marshals to flights. Hundreds of law enforcement officers from Homeland Security Department agencies are being trained and deployed to the federal Air Marshal Service, said a government official familiar with the strategy. There are more than 4,000 federal air marshals, while about 29,000 domestic and international flights take place in the U.S. each day.

In the president's bleak assessment and a White House-released report about what went wrong, the U.S. got an alarming picture of a post-Sept. 11, 2001 debacle: an intelligence community that failed to understand what it had. U.S. intelligence officials had enough information to identify the suspect as an al-Qaeda terrorist operative and keep him off a plane but still could not identify and disrupt the plot, and security measures didn't catch him, either