The most significant portion of President Obama’s remarks today about his Northwest Airlines Flight 253 reviews is his explanation of what went wrong: The
“„The bottom line is this: the U.S. government had sufficient information to uncover this plot and to potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack. But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots that would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list. In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence we already had. The information was there. Agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it, and our professionals were trained to look for it and bring it all together.