Obama Acknowledges Mistakes Surrounding Flight 253, Pledges Action

Following a day of meetings with national and homeland security officials, President Barack Obama acknowledged Tuesday that while the intelligence community received significant information regarding the attempted terrorist attack aboard flight 253 Christmas eve, they failed to “connect those dots.”

“This was not a failure to collect intelligence. This was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we already had,” said Obama.

“The system has failed in a potentially disastrous way,” the president added. “It is my responsibility to find out why and to correct that failure.”

The president promised a wide-range of improvements in U.S. security, including an overhaul of the terrorist watch and no-fly lists.

Obama added that the Christmas eve incident will not deter his administration’s plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, but explained that Yemeni prisoners will not be transfered back to their country.