Obama orders anti-terror changes

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday ordered intelligence agencies to take a series of steps to streamline how terrorism threats are pursued and analyzed, saying the government had to respond aggressively to the failures that allowed a Nigerian to allegedly ignite an explosive mixture on a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day.

The president also directed the Homeland Security Department to speed the installation of $1 billion in advanced-technology equipment for the screening of passengers, including body scanners at U.S. airports, and to work with international airports to see that they upgrade equipment to protect U.S.-bound passengers.

He said intelligence reports involving threats would be distributed more widely among agencies. He instructed the State Department to review its visa policy to make it more difficult for people with connections to terrorism to receive visas, while making it simpler to revoke visas to the United States when questions arise.

The administration also is adding more air marshals to flights. Hundreds of law-enforcement officers from Homeland Security Department agencies are being trained, said a government official. There are more than 4,000 federal air marshals, while about 29,000 domestic and international flights take place in the U.S. each day.

"We are at war," Obama said, releasing an unclassified version of a report on the thwarted attack. He pledged not to "succumb to a siege mentality" sacrificing America's civil liberties for security, but he called for expanding the criteria for adding people to terrorism watch lists.

The report concluded that the government's counterterrorism operations had been caught off guard by the sophistication of an al-Qaida cell in Yemen, where officials say the plot against the United States originated. "We didn't know they had progressed to the point of actually launching individuals here," said John Brennan, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser.

The report criticized the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) and the CIA. The president ordered both agencies to accelerate the dissemination of information about potential plots and to develop ways of more quickly pursuing connective threads on potential terrorists. "In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary," Obama said.

Mark Lowenthal, the CIA's assistant director for analysis between 2002 and 2005, said of the new steps: "You can't ask analysts to think faster. And the president's solution to have analysts share more information sooner is only going to exacerbate the problem that got us into this flap in the first place."

Obama ordered the review of the incident in which the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, who was traveling to Detroit from Amsterdam, is suspected of trying to ignite an explosive in his underwear that could have brought down a Northwest Airlines flight and its 278 passengers.

Officials said human error led to perhaps the biggest lapse of all: the failure to put Abdulmutallab on the no-fly list despite the government having information that showed him to be not only a threat, but also a threat with a visa to visit the United States. The report, conducted by Brennan, blamed a variety of errors, including a misspelling of Abdulmutallab's name.

Obama said the missteps were not the fault of one individual or one agency and took responsibility for the failures, saying: "The buck stops with me."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.