Obama: US should have stopped Detroit terror plot (Extra)

Jan 5, 2010, 22:24 GMT

Washington - US President Barack Obama on Tuesday insisted that the intelligence community should have been able to prevent the Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner and vowed swift changes in airline security and intelligence-gathering.

After a meeting with more than a dozen cabinet members and top security officials, Obama said it was clear that the US could have prevented a Nigerian from boarding a plane in Amsterdam and allegedly trying to detonate explosives before landing in Detroit.

'The bottom line is this: the United States government had sufficient information to uncover this plot and potentially disrupt this attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots,' Obama said after the White House meeting.

'When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way.'

Obama said he would be announcing more steps to improve US security in the coming days. The changes would be primarily aimed at improving coordination between intelligence agencies, which was a key problem in the run-up to the December 25 attack.