Obama meets security team to consider steps after Detroit plot

Jan 5, 2010, 19:46 GMT

Washington - US President Barack Obama was meeting Tuesday with cabinet members and top security chiefs to discuss boosting security measures in the wake of a Christmas Day attempt to blow up an airliner over Detroit.

The meeting was to be attended by more than a dozen top administration officials including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Leon Panetta.

The US intelligence community has been under fire for failing to prevent the suspect, a Nigerian man, from boarding a US-bound plane and trying to detonate an explosive as the December 25 flight from Amsterdam was nearing landing in Detroit.

Obama has promised 'accountability' for what he termed 'systemic failures' that allowed the plot to move forward. But White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama had full confidence in his top officials, including Panetta and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Critics have argued that the Christmas plot exposed weaknesses in the US intelligence system that should have been dealt with in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Obama was expected to address that failure after the meeting.

'The president is as frustrated as I'm sure many of the American people are. We've spent a lot of money in the intervening years,' Gibbs said. 'We have to ... reassure the American people that all that can be done and is and will be done to keep them protected.'

Coming one day after Obama returned from a two-week holiday in Hawaii, no major measures were expected to be announced after the meeting. Obama would offer a 'candid update' on the security review he ordered in the aftermath of the failed Christmas plot, Gibbs said.

Some security changes already took effect this week. The White House said Monday that thousands of names had been added or removed from terrorism watch lists held by the United States to guard against further attacks.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with attempting to blow up the Delta/Northwest Airlines flight, was on a generic watch list of some 550,000 names but had not been placed on a more restrictive no-fly list.

Airport screening procedures were also tightened. US-bound flight passengers from more than a dozen countries will automatically face tougher security measures, including travellers from Yemen, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.