CNN news 2010-01-07 加文本

2010-01-07 cnn

HEIDI COLLINS, cnn ANCHOR: Your safety is the focus today at the White House. President Obama is meeting with his top national security team to review the attempted terrorist bombing of Northwest flight 253. What went wrong and how can the system be fixed? cnn White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux is joining us now to set the stage. Suzanne, who exactly is going to be in the meeting and what can we expect to come out of it?

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, cnn WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Sure, Heidi. Well there's going to be more than about 20 people or so at the table in the situation room with the president, clearly to give updated reports. It's really the first time he's going to have this whole group face-to-face getting these briefings.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is going to be there, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, as well as Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. The director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair as well as the head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, attorney general, FBI head, all of them giving reports, the latest updates.

And essentially, what one senior administration official is calling lessons learned here. At least initial reports about what do they know about this attempted airline attack, how could different agencies have acted better and done better in their performance. Four main areas, one of them is the terror watch list. Should it have been a broader list? Should it net more names, more people, give a heads up on who could be a suspicious person?

Secondly, the intelligence-gathering process, did the agency share information and was there an attempt in any way to keep information, turf battles or turf wars taking place.

Third, how do you stop these future attacks. What were the signs, the signals that people should have been looking for. And finally, the airlines themselves screening passengers ahead of time, how could you have simply prevented this guy, the suspect, Abdulmutallab, from getting on the plane in the first place. All of these things are going to be presented to the president. And Heidi, it's important to know that the president himself will come out after this meeting and tell the American people that, yes, there are some initial reforms that are going to be put in place immediately. Some of those having to do with those terror watch lists as well as visa policies.