Obama scolds his intelligence brass for failure

Washington, Jan 6 (PTI) Dubbing the botched Christmas Day attempt to blow up a US airliner as a "screw-up", an angry President Barack Obama has taken his intelligence brass to task for failing in a potentially disastrous way to "connect the dots" despite enough advance warnings.

In a highly unusual public rebuke, a grim Obama told the Americans that the government had enough information to foil the attack ahead of time, but the intelligence community though trained to do so had failed to "connect the dots".

"This is not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it", US President said in a statement after a 90-minute meeting with his top intelligence and security brass in the White House Situation Room.

"Intelligence was not fully analysed and leveraged", Obama said hitting out that the agencies have missed other "red-flags" before the attack.