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Associated PressThe White House is not expected to announce the firing of any officials over intelligence failures — for now anyway — as President Barack Obama prepares to tell the nation more about a botched terrorist attack over Detroit and what else he will do to beef up security.
Eager to fix a glaring breakdown in intelligence sharing and get the incident behind him, Obama will speak Thursday about a declassified account of the near catastrophe on Christmas Day. The White House also plans to release a copy of the report with some detail stripped away for security reasons.
U.S. officials say a 23-year-old Nigerian man with ties to al-Qaida tried to detonate an explosive device aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was indicted Wednesday on charges of attempted murder and other crimes. His father had warned U.S. officials of his extremist ties but that threat was never identified fully by intelligence officials, a breakdown that has drawn intense, candid criticism from the president himself.
It remains unclear whether any top officials from Obama's not-quite-year-old administration will eventually lose their jobs over the debacle. No one lost their job or was censured after the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people nine years ago in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.
"I don't know what the final outcome in terms of hiring and firing will be," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.
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