The Urgency of Getting This Right Good afternoon, everybody. I
just concluded a meeting with members of my national security team,
including those from our intelligence, homeland security and law
enforcement agencies involved in the security
Pirates of the Burning Sea CDKEY reviews that I ordered
after the failed attack on Christmas Day. I called these leaders to
the White House because we face a challenge of the utmosturgency.
As we saw on Christmas, al Qaeda and its extremist allies will stop
at nothing in their efforts to kill Americans. And we are
determined not only to thwart those plans, but to disrupt,
dismantle and defeat their networks once and for all. Indeed, over
the past year, we've taken the fight to al Qaeda and its allies
wherever they plot and train, be it in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in
Yemen and Somalia, or in other countries around the world. Here at
home, our intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement
agencies have worked together with considerable success: gathering
intelligence, stitching it together, and making arrests -- from
Denver to Texas, from Illinois to New York -- disrupting plots and
saving American
star wars galaxieslives. And these successes have not
come without a price, as we saw last week in the loss of our
courageous CIA officers in Afghanistan. But when a suspected
terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day
the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way. And it's my
responsibility to find out why, and to correct that failure so that
we can prevent such attacks in the future. And that's why, shortly
after the attempted bombing over Detroit, I ordered two reviews. I
directed Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to review
aviationscreening, technology andbuy
cd key SWG procedures. She briefed me on her initial
findings today, and I'm pleased that this review is drawing on the
best science and technology, including the expertise of Secretary
of Energy Steven Chu and his department. I also directed my
counterterrorism and homeland security advisor John Brennan to lead
a thorough review into our terrorist watch-listing system so we can
fix what went wrong. As we discussed today, this ongoing review
continues to reveal more about the human and systemic failures that
almost cost nearly 300 lives. We will make a summary of this
preliminary report public within the next few days, but let me
share some of what we know so far. As I described over the weekend,
elements of our intelligence community knew that Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab had traveled to Yemen and joined up with extremists
there. It now turns out that our intelligence community knew of
other red flags -- that al Qaeda 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 was known -- who we now know was in fact the
individual involved in the Christmas attack. 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
steam cd keybring 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. So I made it clear today to my team: I want our initial
reviews completed this week. tabula rasa Cdkey I want specific
recommendations for corrective actions to fix what went wrong. I
want those reforms implemented immediately, so that this doesn't
happen again and so we can prevent future attacks. And I know that
every member of my team that I met with today understands the
urgency of getting this right. And I appreciate that each of them
took responsibility for the shortfalls within their own
agencies.