Won't tolerate security failures: Obama

Washington, Jan 6: President Barack Obama admitted that US intelligence community failures led to a breach in security on Christmas Day.

After a meeting with his top security advisors on Tuesday, Jan 5, Obama vowed to act with all urgency to tighten air security.

"This was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand intelligence we already had," said Obama.

Obama said that US intelligence knew that the group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula wanted to strike not only US targets in Yemen but in the United States itself over the holiday season.

He further said, "I will accept that intelligence by its nature is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analysed or fully leveraged. It is unacceptable and I will not tolerate it."

"When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way," he added.

On Dec 25, the suspected al-Qaeda operative, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to set off explosive device aboard Northwestern airlines bound to Detroit from Amsterdam.