Dubbing the botched Christmas Day attempt to blow up a US airliner as a "screw-up", an angry president Barack Obama has taken his intelligence brass to task for failing in a potentially disastrous way to "connect the dots", despite enough advance warnings.
In a highly unusual public rebuke, a grim Obama told the Americans that the government had enough information to foil the attack ahead of time, but the intelligence community, though trained to do so, had failed to "connect the dots".
"This is not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it," US president said in a statement after a 90-minute meeting with his top intelligence and security brass in the White House situation room.
"Intelligence was not fully analysed and leveraged," Obama said hitting out that the agencies have missed other "red-flags" before the attack.
It was "a screw-up that could have been disastrous" and should have been avoided, the president said.
Noting that there was sufficient information to uncover the December 25 plot, Obama said that the intelligence community failed to connect the dots, and added that this would not be tolerated.
"Elements of our intelligence community knew that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had travelled to Yemen and joined up with extremists there.
It now turns out that our intelligence community knew of other red flags: that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike, not only American targets in Yemen, but the United States itself," Obama said.
"We had information that this group was working with an individual who we now know was in fact the individual involved in the Christmas attack," the US president said in a statement soon after his meeting with the top national security and intelligence aides.
Obama had convened a meeting of his top intelligence and security aides to review the security breach and intelligence failure in the December 25 plot in which a Nigerian national, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, successfully sneaked in explosives inside the a US plane, but somehow failed to ignite it.
Some 300 people were on board the North West Airlines plane coming from Amsterdam to Detroit.
Though the president did not do finger pointing, his top aides said that process was on to make people accountable for lapses.
Obama's tough remarks came as the alleged bomber Abdulmutallab told FBI investigators that he had received training and instructions from al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.
