Key Republican calls for congressional inquiry on attempted bombing

With President Obama acknowledging that a "systemic failure" allowed a Nigerian with apparent links to Al Qaeda to nearly blow up a US airliner on Christmas Day, the top Republican on the congressional committee that helped investigate what went wrong before 9/11 is urging a similar inquiry.

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform helped push for creating the Department of Homeland Security and for revamping intelligence agencies.

"Recent events have exposed a sobering reality that the very failures that made us vulnerable before 9/11 still threaten our homeland security today,” Representative Darrell Issa of California, the ranking Republican on the committee, said today.

“When we created DHS, there was unanimous agreement here on the Hill and in the Executive that we must go from an atmosphere of need to know to need to share.  It now appears that our various counter terrorist agencies are reverting to their pre-9/11 ways and there refusal to share information has put our nation at risk,” Issa added in a statement.

He called for an immediate series of bipartisan hearings and briefings "detailing the failure of agencies to share information and utilize databases that could have prevented this terrorist from boarding an aircraft bound for Detroit."

UPDATE: The Senate Intelligence Committee announced later today that it will hold hearings on Jan. 21, the Associated Press reports.

"We will be following the intelligence down the rabbit hole to see where the breakdown occurred and how to prevent this failure in the future," said Senator Kit Bond of Missouri, top Republican on the committee. "Somebody screwed up big time."

Obama received a preliminary report today on the terrorist watch lists and on passenger screening -- both of which apparently failed on Christmas Day. Leaders of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission have said in recent days that the apparent communication and other lapses in US intelligence leading up to the attempted bombing of the Detroit-bound passenger yet were the exactly the flaws they pushed to fix.   

"Our report documented again and again the failures and the problem this time, it's, you know, it's like reading the same script over again," Thomas Kean, the former New Jersey governor and co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, said on CNN's "Larry King Live" on Wednesday night.

"They are talking about the fact that intelligence agencies didn't talk to one another. And that was the major fault we found in our report. We said if they had talked to each other, there was a possibility that 9/11 just wouldn't have happened. And here again, we were lucky this time but again, intelligence agencies didn't seem to be talking to one another," he added.

Asked whether the US is safer, Kean replied, "Yes, we're safer now but not, as we found out in this incident, not as safe as we should be. I mean, that's the problem, that we're safer now but these people are looking for new ways to attack and this was a new way they tried this time. And thanks to some brave people on the plane and perhaps some failure of their technology, we were a little lucky this time.

"But the technology is we've got to stop them at the airport before they get on the plane. This fellow should have been stopped at the airport. He should not have had a visa to come into this country. He was the profile of a terrorist, as you and I understand terrorism. Should have been identified, should have been stopped and we ought to do that to terrorists in the future."