“President Obama said Tuesday [January 5, 2010] that the government had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot to bring down a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day, but that intelligence officials had ‘failed to connect those dots.’ ‘This was not a failure to collect intelligence,’ Mr. Obama said after meeting with his national security team for nearly two hours. ‘It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.’ He added: ‘We have to do better, we will do better, and we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line.’ ”
– Jeff Zeleny and Helene Cooper, “Obama Says U.S. Failed to Understand Intelligence on Terror Plot,” The New York Times, Jan. 5, 2010