Obama: terror attack ‘dots’ not connected

After that 90-minute private reckoning around a table in the super-secure White House Situation Room, a grim-faced Obama informed Americans that the government had enough information to thwart the attack ahead of time but that the intelligence community, though trained to do so, did not “connect those dots.”

“That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it,” he said, standing solo to address the issue publicly for the fifth time -- and the first in Washington -- since the Dec. 25 incident.

Afterward, the White House released quotes from the Situation Room session. Disclosing Obama’s words during a private meeting is normally strictly off-limits for this White House and most others before it. In this case, Obama advisers are eager to portray the president as aggressively on the job -- even as he has little, or in this case nothing, new to announce about how to tackle the security lapses that allowed the airline plot to almost succeed.

Obama did not say who, if anyone, in the government might be held accountable. Earlier in the day, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president still has full confidence in his three top national security officials: the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano -- all of whom were among those around the table with Obama later.

For now, administration officials say that Obama believes blame is shared enough that no one agency or official appears clearly enough at fault to be fired. However, as the president and his team continue to identify what the security gaps were and how to fill them, Obama could determine that someone needs to go, said one senior administration official familiar with Obama’s thinking. The official spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter.

It was not clear how long that process of both accountability and policy changes might take, though Obama stressed urgency and speed in his public remarks. “We will do better, and we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line,” he said.

A White House official said that Obama warned his lieutenants against looking for blame and that none of this sort of finger-pointing took place in the meeting, where the leaders of each agency took responsibility for failures within their respective organizations.

US administration decides to suspend Guantanamo prisoner transfer to Yemen 

The Obama administration has suspended the transfer of detainees from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay to Yemen as a result of the deteriorating security situation there. President Barack Obama bowed to political pressure from Democratic and Republican lawmakers not to send any more prisoners to Yemen as a result of revelations that a would-be bomber on a Detroit-bound plane had received al-Qaeda training in Yemen.“It was always our intent to transfer detainees to other countries only under conditions that provide assurances that our security is being protected,” Obama said.

“Given the unsettled situation, I’ve spoken to the attorney general (Eric Holder) and we’ve agreed that we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time,” Obama said. Several of the roughly 91 Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay had been cleared to be sent home, as the Obama administration struggles to close the prison. White House officials made clear that the suspension was considered a temporary one. “We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda,” Obama said.

His decision came after The Times newspaper of London reported that at least a dozen former Guantanamo Bay prisoners had rejoined al-Qaeda to fight in Yemen.

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan had left the door open to more transfers to Yemen as recently as Sunday in a round of television interviews. He stressed that no decisions would be made that would put Americans at risk. Some leading Democrats from Obama’s own party had called for a halt to the transfers, including Representative Jane Harman, a member of the House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell welcomed the move and said Obama should revisit his decision to close the facility. Washington Reuters