MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
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.
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: 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: 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: 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: 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.