President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence agencies could have prevented the attempt to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day.
“This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” Obama said after meeting with senior national security and intelligence officials, “it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. ....That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.”
“Our intelligence community failed to connect those dots,” he said. “We have to do better, and we will do better, and we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line.”
On Obama’s first full day back at the White House after an 11-day vacation in Hawaii, his words were far sharper than his previous comments since the incident, conveying a controlled anger about what he had heard in preliminary reviews of what went wrong.
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