Obama: ‘We Are at War’

 President Obama on Thursday ordered a series of steps to improve the government’s ability to collect, share, analyze and act on intelligence of terrorist threats, saying the findings of a government review of the attempted airline bombing on Christmas Day revealed significant shortcomings in national security.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Mr. Obama spoke from the State Dining Room.

“We are at war,” Mr. Obama said in remarks from the White House State Dining Room. While he promised not to “succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices” America’s civil liberties for security, he called for the immediate strengthening of the nation’s terrorism watch lists by expanding the criteria for adding people to those lists.
“In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what these steps are designed to do.”
The president said intelligence reports involving threats to the United States would be distributed more widely among agencies.
“We must follow the leads that we get and we must pursue them until plots are disrupted,” Mr. Obama said. “We can’t sit on information to protect the American people.”
The White House made public the declassified account of how a suspected terrorist managed to elude intelligence officials and board an airplane with an explosive mixture concealed in his underwear. The classified version of the report offered a far starker view, officials said, of how close the United States came to encountering tragedy.
The president said the missteps were not the fault of one individual or one agency. He took responsibility for the failures, saying: “The buck stops with me.”
Mr. Obama ordered the review of the incident in which a Nigerian man traveling to Detroit from Amsterdam tried to ignite an explosive that could have brought down a Northwest Airlines flight and its 278 passengers. The man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, is set to be arraigned Friday on charges of attempted murder on a plane, attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and other offenses.
The president’s statement marked the second time in as many days that he delivered public remarks on the case of the attempted airline bombing and the intelligence lapses that surrounded it. He said Tuesday that the government had enough information to uncover the plot, but intelligence officials “failed to connect those dots.”
Mr. Obama arrived at the lectern in the State Dining Room at the White House more than three hours after he was originally scheduled to speak. His remarks were postponed twice in the afternoon, officials said, because declassifying the security review took far longer than expected.
The White House released the report – detailing what the government knew about the terrorist incident and what should have been done to prevent it – as an attempt to illustrate that the administration is conducting its business with transparency and airing mistakes in an effort to show the American people that they will be corrected.
Top security officials spoke to reporters in a briefing following the president’s remarks.
John O. Brennan, the president’s chief counterrorism adviser, said the intelligence failures that took place before Christmas were not similar to the lapses that led to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Back then, some agencies were denied access to critical information, he said, but those problems have been resolved with the changes in the structure of intelligence agencies.
“This was not a failure to share information,” Mr. Brennan said.
Mr. Brennan, who conducted the internal review, said the most significant finding of his report was the strength of the Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He called it “one of the most lethal” cells of the terrorist organization. Before the Christmas Day terror attempt, he said, intelligence officials were not aware that the cell was organized enough to mount a plot on the United States.
“It demonstrated to us that we had a strategic sense of where they are going,” Mr. Brennan said.