WASHINGTON — Call it the underwear briefing.
For two hours yesterday, President Obama huddled in the White House Situation Room with his top military, intelligence and diplomatic officers to come up with a strategy for preventing another terrorist from getting on a US-bound plane with a bomb in his pants.
“This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous. We dodged a bullet but just barely,” he told his top Cabinet secretaries and other officials in the super-secret “war room” bunker beneath the White House, according to a White House statement.
“It was averted by brave individuals, not because the system worked and that is not acceptable,” Obama added. “While there will be a tendency for finger pointing, I will not tolerate it.”
The White House statement said the leaders of each agency at the meeting took responsibility for failures at their respective organizations.
The highly choreographed meeting the day after Obama returned from a family vacation in Hawaii came after nearly two weeks of bungled responses to the attempted bombing on Christmas Day.
Speaking to reporters gathered in the White House afterwards, Obama peeled back widely condemned comments made since the attack by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that “the system worked” and by top counterterrorism czar John Brennan that there was no “smoking gun” that could have prevented the crotch-bomber from boarding the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
There were, Obama said yesterday, plenty of “red flags,” but the information was not “fully analyzed or duly leveraged” and the intelligence agencies “failed to connect the dots.”
“The US government had sufficient information to uncover this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack,” he said.
Obama, who didn’t take any questions from the press, told reporters: “Every member of my team understands the urgency of getting this right.”
During the top-level bunker meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others, Obama impressed upon them the importance of a full and thorough review of everything that went wrong that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian who trained with al Qaeda in Yemen, to slip past security with a simple, yet potentially devastating, bomb in his pants.
A summary of the review will be made public over the next few days.
Obama also said he will halt the transfer of Yemeni terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay to Yemen, where the crotch-bomb plot apparently was hatched.