Analysis: For Obama, what will accountability be?

[February 04, 2010]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- As the White House portrays the dramatic scene, President Barack Obama summoned his national security team to the Situation Room for a lecture about accountability after the failed terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound airliner.

"This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous," the commander in chief said.

The White House took the uncommon step of releasing that this-will-not-stand quote from a room where the secrecy usually is fiercely protected. Obama went on to say, according to the distributed account: "We dodged a bullet, but just barely. ... While there will be a tendency for finger-pointing, I will not tolerate it."

Tough language, but where will it lead?

Words are not enough. What people want is action.

Five times now since a man linked to al-Qaida allegedly tried to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, Obama has updated the nation. His message is one of a president determined for people to see he is in charge, demanding results and willing to call out his own government's flaws.

All this comes after some grumbles about a slow initial response on the part of Obama, who was in Hawaii on vacation and first spoke about the incident three days after it happened.

As the days pass, Obama's window for unilateral action narrows. At least three Senate committees plan hearings on the security scare later this month.

Beyond concentrating attention on homeland security, the botched terrorist attack has political implications for the White House. Republicans traditionally have sought to claim the toughest stand on national security come election time and could see an opening to expose this incident as a vulnerability.

So Obama is promising the nation he'll do exactly what he says the intelligence world did not: connect the dots.

The deeper Obama gets into the weeds of what happened, the blunter his words become. His mission is to fix an exposed national security system quickly. And for a president who promises accountability, it also is to show that he really means it.

Will somebody get fired over this security lapse? Perhaps not. But in political terms it can't hurt Obama for voters to believe he's willing to roll heads if necessary.

The president's review is centered on finding and filling the gaps in the nation's intelligence and terrorist detection systems. In the course of that, "he'll be able to determine whether or not somebody has to lose their job," said one official close to Obama who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the matter.

And so on Tuesday, Obama outlined more missed signs about al-Qaida's plans and about the accused attacker, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The 23-year-old Nigerian never moved from a database of suspected terrorists to a "no-fly" list because the intelligence was not fully analyzed by those trained to do just that.

"The information was there," Obama said.

He painted a picture in which people failed to do their jobs, allowing a potentially disastrous situation. "I will not tolerate it," he said again.

The White House this week is expected to make public a preliminary report from Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, about what happened.

Obama also is promising to announce more steps in the coming days to disrupt terrorist attacks, including improving the way people are screened at airports. That's on top of short-term security measures the president has taken since Dec. 25.

But the problem is systemic, and presumably, so must be the action.

"We have to do better -- and we will do better," Obama said emphatically.

And then he listed all that he demanded from his officials: Get your reports in this week, get me recommendations to fix what went wrong, be prepared to put them in place fast.

The president said everyone in the room took responsibility. White House aides said not one finger was pointed. Of course, the president had already told his team not to do so.

The security breach and the troubling questions it poses have dominated the start of the new year for Obama. And while the top story of the day can change quickly around the White House, for now, Obama is facing questions he would never have wanted at the start of his second calendar year as president.

Does he have faith in his national security team?

Is that team up to the task?

Is he tough enough on terror?

Obama himself took no questions Tuesday. He stood alone in the White House's Grand Foyer and left after his nearly nine-minute statement, capped with a declaration that the intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement systems must be held accountable.

He said that applies not just to the institutions but to "the people in them."

"That's what the American people deserve," Obama said. "As president, that's exactly what I will demand."

The line from Obama is clear. But it will take many others to connect all those dots.

[Associated Press; By BEN FELLER]

Ben Feller covers the White House for The Associated Press.

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