Pres. Obama takes responsibility, promises accountability on Flight 253 plot

President Barack Obama on Thursday stressed "the buck stops with me" on matters of national security, acknowledging he shared responsibility for the failures leading up to the attempted bombing of Flight 253 on Christmas Day.

Obama also assured for the second time this week that he would hold agencies, organizations and individuals accountable for the intelligence lapses that ultimately allowed suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to attack the Detroit-bound plane.

But the president stopped short Thursday of declaring any one individual or agency primarily responsible for a series of intelligence lapses he has previously described as a "systemic failure." While summarizing the contents of the White House's preliminary Flight 253 report, declassified today, Obama said he was less interested in "passing out blame" than learning from those mistakes.

"As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility," Obama said.

"Over the past two weeks, we've been reminded again of the challenge we face in protecting our country against a foe that is bent on our destruction. And while passions and politics can often obscure the hard work before us, let's be clear about what this moment demands," he added.

Obama's speech -- the second this week -- follows the release of a preliminary report on intelligence gathering and interpretation prior to the Christmas Day attack.

Much of that report's contents were already known, but Obama again emphasized key elements of it Thursday afternoon. He explained the intelligence community's call not to follow up on important leads resulted in a "larger failure of analysis," which ultimately kept Abdulmutallab off the crucial "no-fly" list.

Consequently, a more streamlined, effective process for analyzing that intelligence could have prevented the attack above Detroit on Christmas morning, the president said.

As a result, Obama said he was implementing a host of new changes to the country's security architecture. New rules would require intelligence agencies to assign responsibility on higher priority threats to ensure their full investigation, and mandate those reports be more widely disseminated. Obama also announced an expansion of the country's flight watch lists, to better manage air safety.

All of those reforms -- which Obama said his security advisers would detail later this afternoon -- are designed to prevent a repeat of Flight 253, he said.

"In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary," Obama said. "That's what these steps are designed to do, and we will continue to work with Congress to ensure that our intelligence, homeland security, and law enforcement communities have the resources they need to keep the American people safe."