AP 2009-12-30（在线收听）

I want to speak to the American people again today because some of this primary information that has surfaced in the last twenty-four hours raises some serious concerns.

It’s been widely reported that the father of the suspect in the Christmas incident warned U.S officials in Africa about his son’s extremist views. It now appears that weeks ago, this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect’s name on a No Fly List.

There appears to be other deficiencies as well. Even without this one report, there were bits of information available within the intelligence community that could have and should have been pieced together.

We’ve achieved much since 9/11 in terms of collecting information that relates to terrorists and potential terrorist attacks, but it’s becoming clear that the system that has been placed for years now is not sufficiently up-to-date to take full advantage of the information we collect and the knowledge we have.

Had this critical information been shared, it could have been compiled with other intelligence and a fuller, clearer picture of the suspect would’ve emerged. The warning signs would have triggered red flags and the suspect would have never been allowed to board that plane for America.

When our government has information on a known extremist and that information is not shared and acted upon as it should have been. So that this extremist broads a plane with dangerous explosives that could’ve cost nearly three hundred lives. A systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable.

The reviews I’ve ordered will surely tell us more, but what already is apparent is that there was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security.We need to learn from this episode and act quickly to fix the flaws in our system because our security is at stake and lives are at stake.