MADELEINE BRAND, host:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Madeleine Brand, sitting in for Renee Montagne.
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.
Two weeks after an attempted bombing was stopped onboard a plane, American officials are still debating what they can learn.
BRAND: We're hearing about our security throughout this morning. A Nigerian suspect who visited Yemen raises questions about whether the United States is looking for terrorists in the right places. And we'll have more on that in a moment.
INSKEEP: We start with President Obama's orders to improve the nation's early warning system.
NPR's Scott Horsley has a report.
SCOTT HORSLEY: President Obama says the best way to prevent someone from blowing up an airplane or launching some other kind of terrorist attack on the U.S. is to get timely, accurate intelligence about would-be attackers, share that information, analyze it, and then act on it quickly and effectively.
President BARACK OBAMA: That's what our intelligence community does every day. But unfortunately, that's not what happened in the lead-up to Christmas Day.
HORSLEY: Instead, the United States was caught by surprise when a young Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, boarded a Northwest Airlines jet with what authorities say were hidden explosives in his underwear. The bungled attack should not have been a surprise, though. Various intelligence agencies knew Abdulmutallab was in Yemen, under the influence of Islamic extremists. They knew that al-Qaida forces in Yemen were working with a Nigerian and wanted to attack the U.S. They even knew what kind of hidden explosives might be used.
The administration took pains to say this was not a case where one spy agency withheld what it knew from others, as sometimes happened before 9/11. But the president's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, says even though the pieces of the puzzles were widely available throughout the intelligence community, no one managed to put them together.
Mr. JOHN BRENNAN (Deputy National Security Adviser, Homeland Security and Counterterrorism): The intelligence fell through the cracks. This was not a failure to collect or share intelligence. It was a failure to connect and integrate and understand the intelligence we had.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama ordered that from now on, someone in the intelligence community must be given specific responsibility to make sure every lead is followed up on. Our review of the Northwest Airlines attack uncovered a number of human errors. Some databases weren't thoroughly checked, for example. And for a time, the State Department mistakenly believed that Abdulmutallab didn't have a U.S. visa, because his name was misspelled. But, Mr. Obama said, no one person or agency is to blame for what he called a systemic failure.
Pres. OBAMA: I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer.
HORSLEY: Ultimately, Mr. Obama said, the buck stops with him, although his adviser Brennan also took some of the blame.
Mr. BRENNAN: I told the president today I let him down, and I told him that I will do better, and we will do better as a team.
HORSLEY: The government is reviewing its terrorist watch lists, and will be looking for new ways to sift through the mountains of information it collects. But Mr. Obama says even the best intelligence can't identify every would-be terrorist ahead of time. So he's also ordering beefed-up security at airports in the U.S. and abroad. The Department of Homeland Security was already planning to install another 300 full-body scanners around the country to be supplemented with pat-downs and sniffer dogs. Mr. Obama's also putting the national laboratories to work on technology that can find the explosives metal detectors miss.
Pres. OBAMA: There is, of course, no full-proof solution. As we develop new screening technologies and procedures, our adversaries will seek new ways to evade them, that was - as was shown by the Christmas attack. In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary.
HORSLEY: Even as he promised stronger defensive measures, Mr. Obama vowed the U.S. will not sacrifice its open society or give in to what he called a siege mentality.
Pres. OBAMA: Great and proud nations don't hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust. That is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I am president, we will never hand them that victory. We will define the character of our country, not some band of small men intent on killing innocent men, women and children.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama repeated that the U.S. is a nation at war against al-Qaida. And he promised to do whatever it takes to defeat them.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.