Obama announces more steps to defend nation against terrorism threats

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday announced some more steps to defend the nation against terrorism threats, in response to a failed bombing plot against a U.S. international flight on Christmas Day.

U.S. President Barack Obama makes statements to outline steps the U.S. government is taking to try to shore up airline security, at the White House in Washington January 7, 2010. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

"Today, I'm directing a series of additional corrective steps across multiple agencies," Obama said at the White House in a live televised speech.

The speech was delivered as the Obama government wrapped up reviews on the terrorist watch list and aviation security after a Nigerian trained and equipped by al-Qaeda carried an explosive device onto a U.S. international flight and attempted to set it off on Dec. 25.

Obama pointed out mistakes made in three ways led up to the potential disaster that could have cost 300 lives, which included intelligence community's failure to follow up a particular streams of intelligence related to a possible attack, a larger failure of analysis of intelligence, and ineffective terror watch list that allowed the suspected Nigerian to board the plane from the Netherlands to the United States.

Measures in four areas will be adopted to prevent such attack attempts from happening again, said the president, in addition to the three steps he had announced on Tuesday.

He directed the U.S. intelligence community to begin assigning responsibilities for investigating all leads "on high-priority threats," and distribute the intelligence reports more rapidly and widely.

He also called for strengthened capability in analyzing, integrating and processing intelligence, and ordered to improve the criteria used to add individuals to the terrorist watch lists, especially no-fly list.

"So taken together, these reforms will improve the intelligence community's ability to collect, share, integrate, analyze and act on intelligence swiftly and effectively," he said. "In short, they will help our intelligence community do its job even better and protect American lives."

In the meantime, Obama underlined the need to invest in new systems and technology as well as strengthen international partnership to improve security screening at airports across the world.

As head of the state, Obama said that he would not "pass out blame," and took responsibility for the security mistakes leading to the Christmas bombing plot.