Obama: 'Other Red Flags' in Christmas Plot

WASHINGTON (Jan. 5) – Intelligence agencies knew of "other red flags" and had "sufficient information" to disrupt the Christmas Day bomb plot but "failed to connect the dots," President Barack Obama said today after meeting with his national security team at the White House.

Despite expectations that Obama would announce new measures to improve airport security and the watch lists designed to keep suspected terrorists out of the skies, the president reiterated his frustration and disappointment over the attempted attack.

"I will not tolerate it," he said of the failure to put tell-tale signs together. "Every member of my team understands the urgency of getting it right."

Obama spoke after a meeting of nearly two dozen top security and intelligence officials in the White House Situation Room. The senior officials did not appear with the president, who took no questions from reporters.

"It now turns out that our intelligence community knew of other red flags that al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike not only American targets in Yemen, but the United States itself. And we had information that this group was working with an individual ... who we now know was in fact the individual in the Christmas attack," he said.

"We have to do better and we will do better and we have to do it quickly," the president declared.

In what may be the closest thing to a silver lining in what was a "potentially disastrous" security breach, the president said that intelligence agencies had collected plenty of information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula handlers. The problem was integrating and analyzing the intelligence so that the Nigerian man could have been placed on a "no-fly" list.

The president made some news. He said he would suspend further transfers of Guantanamo detainees from Yemen, home to the alleged masterminds of the plot. Nearly half of the 198 detainees remaining in the Cuban prison are from Yemen.

Still, Obama stood by his decision to close the prison. He noted that its existence has proved an ideal recruiting tool for al-Qaida and remains an excuse for extremists to target the U.S.

"Make no mistake, we will close Guantanamo prison," he said. "We will close it in a manner that keeps Americans safe."

The president said officials would complete their reviews this week and reforms would be implemented immediately.

He noted that the State Department, which was unaware that the British government had denied a visa to Abdulmutallab, would be required to keep up-to-date visa information on those suspected of terrorist ties.

Before Obama met with his security brain trust, the Transportation Security Administration directed airlines to give full-body, pat-down searches to U.S.-bound travelers from 14 countries that are state sponsors of terrorism or are "other countries of interest" and promised in the days ahead to announce more.

Under Monday's new TSA rules, travelers from Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen will get extra screening. It's not clear why Cuba, which has not been linked to al-Qaida, was included.

The government also updated its terrorist watch lists, transferring dozens of names to the no-fly roster that previously were, like Abdulmutallab, on a much larger database of those only tangentially suspected of being up to no good. Those on the more exclusive no-fly list are barred from boarding aircraft in, or headed for, the United States.

This wasn't the first time Obama has wrestled with terrorism. From the hours before he took the oath of office nearly one year ago, when rumors of a Somali extremist plot to attack his inauguration, Obama has had to take time from his domestic priorities to deal with the continued threat of Islamic extremists.

"Barack Obama is facing a huge, complex inheritance. He faces multiple challenges on multiple fronts," terrorism expert Fawaz Gerges told Sphere. An expert on Islamic extremism and the author of "America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests?" and other books, Gerges said Obama's enemy has morphed into something quite different than the one George W. Bush battled after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"He is facing a traveling al-Qaida ideology as opposed to a central al-Qaida organization," Gerges said. "This is why it's so difficult to basically expect or even try to construct very specific concrete answers or solutions to what the United States is facing."

Gerges warned that cracking down too heavily on extremists in Yemen "could easily play into the hands of al-Qaida" by sparking a backlash in the Muslim world. Despite calls within the Obama administration to boost military aid to Yemen, stepping up drone attacks and bucking up the government in Sanaa "could be counterproductive," Gerges said.

That calculation was no doubt on the agenda as Obama summoned his security advisers to the White House earlier Tuesday.

"This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous," Obama said at the meeting, according to a White House official.

"We dodged a bullet, but just barely. It was averted by brave individuals, not because the system worked, and that is not acceptable," the official quoted Obama as saying.

Despite calls from critics that he sack some of his top advisers, the president didn't fire any of them. According to the White House official, Obama said there would be a "tendency for finger pointing. I will not tolerate it."

Still, those gathered had plenty of explaining to do. Among them:

• Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, whose initial reaction that "the system worked" may have caused as much political agita as the plot itself.

• CIA Director Leon Panetta, who is also preoccupied with the devastating attack in Afghanistan in which seven agents were killed by a Jordanian al-Qaida "triple agent."

• Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, whose job was created after 9/11 to ride herd on the CIA and more than a dozen other intelligence agencies that failed to connect the dots before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and appeared to have been on holiday again before the Christmas incident.

• Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the very organization whose sole purpose was to draw the lines between those dots but didn't.

Gerges said the challenge for Obama and his team is to "make sure the security system is ironclad. The dots must be connected at all times. There is no margin of error because a catastrophic incident would undermine the Obama presidency."

Scott Stewart, vice president of tactical intelligence for Stratfor, a global intelligence company, which first reported in early September that al-Qaida in Yemen were planning to use a "crotch bomb" to bring down a jet liner, said his initial reaction to reports about the speech is that Obama "was obviously caving into all the pressure" from the left to eventually release prisoners from Guantanmo, despite his decisino to suspend releases to Yemen.

Stewart also rejected Obama's rationale that Gitmo just encouraged Islamic extremists, noting he went to Yemen in 1992 to investigate the first attaacks against Westerners there and that the attack onthe USS Cole in Aden harbor was in Oct. 2000, long before the prison opened.

"Jihadism has been in Yemen for a long time," he said. "They have so many other reasons and they were attacking us long before Gitmo ever existed."