Obama acknowledges mistakes made in Detroit incident

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President Obama today acknowledged that mistakes had been made in dealing with a Nigerian man who has been charged with trying to blow up a jetliner bound for the United States and vowed to move quickly to fix the errors.

The comments, Obama’s second public remarks on the Christmas Day incident, comes as the GOP has stepped up its complaints that the Obama administration was moving too slowly on security issues.

There apparently was a “mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security,” Obama said. “We need to learn from this episode and act quickly to fix the flaws in our system.”

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, has been charged in the Dec. 25 incident that ended without any casualties when passengers subdued him during a flight to Detroit from Amsterdam.

Obama has already ordered investigations into how Abdulmutallab smuggled the failed explosive device through airport security and onto the flight.

A second probe is looking at the watch lists maintained by the federal government. Abdulmutallab’s father warned authorities that he feared his son was becoming radicalized, but Abdulmutallab was placed in a low-level database, rather than on the tougher no-fly list.

It was information from the second probe that Obama focused on today.

“It was widely reported that the father warned about extremist views,” Obama said. “It now appears that weeks ago, this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed.

“There appears to other deficiencies as well,” Obama said, citing warning signs that should have singled out the suspect.

“Our government has not acted as it should have,” Obama said. “A systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable.”

The reviews, expected by Thursday, will have more detail, Obama said.

Republicans have used the incident to attack the administration. GOP lawmakers have seized on comments over the weekend by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs that indicated that the aviation security system worked. Both argued that they were quoted out of context by Republicans and said they were describing efforts to protect flights.

By Monday, Napolitano took to the airwaves to backtrack. “Our system did not work in this instance. No one is happy or satisfied with that,” she said.

Obama defended his appointees and also praised the intelligence community for its efforts to combat terrorism.

-- Michael Muskal

LATimesmuskal