President Obama Declares Failure to Connect the Dots, Not Lack of Intelligence, Caused the Security Breakdown on Christmas Day Bombing Attempt

Today the President announced, after a meeting with his national security team, that:

"The bottom line is this: The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the "no fly" list. In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. The information was there. Agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it. And our professionals were trained to look for it and to bring it all together.

Now, I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That's not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it. Time and again, we've learned that quickly piecing together information and taking swift action is critical to staying one step ahead of a nimble adversary.

So we have to do better -- and we will do better. And we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line."

The President's announcement today is consistent with the conclusions I reached in my post of yesterday. There are members of my family circle who will find it difficult to believe that my views on anything would ever agree with President Obama's. I hope they mark this day.

Now, years after the federal government addressed the organizational and mindset barriers to information sharing between intelligence agencies that led to the failure to connect the dots before 9/11/2001 by establishing the office of Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, the question is whether there will be any consequences for those responsible for the serious lapse in the process of intelligence integration that President Obama described. He sure had all the appropriate people for a line-up of potential suspects in the meeting with him today.

In referring to the government's failure to connect the dots before the failed Christmas Day bombing, the President said: "I will not tolerate it". Now let's see what that means.

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