President Obama has faulted the intelligence community for failing to act on information that could have prevented the failed Christmas Day jetliner attack. The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was not added to a terrorism watch list despite information linking him to militants known to be plotting attacks on the United States. On Tuesday, Obama said US intelligence agencies had failed to “connect the dots.”

President Obama: “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. And we had information that this group was working with an individual who was known — who we now know was in fact the individual involved in the Christmas attack. The bottom line is this: The US government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list.”