'Systemic failure' led to plane bombing attempt: Obama

U.S. President Barack Obama said Tuesday that a "systemic failure" led to the Dec. 25 bombing attempt on a U.S. passenger jet.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old from Nigeria, is accused of trying to light an explosive device on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Speaking from Hawaii, Obama said information about Abdulmutallab that was passed along by the young man's father was not widely distributed.

"It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect's name on a no-fly list," Obama said. "Even without this one report, there were bits of information available within the intelligence community that could have and should have been pieced together."

If the information had been shared and put together with other intelligence, red flags would have gone up and Abdulmutallab would never had been on the flight, the president said.

Obama called that breakdown in communication "totally unacceptable."

He also said he expects to have preliminary reports from two reviews of what happened by Thursday.

"The reviews I’ve ordered will surely tell us more, but what already is apparent is that there was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security," he said.

Obama added that the U.S. needs to act quickly to fix the flaws in its security system.

Obama also sided with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who was criticized for saying Sunday that the incident showed the aviation security system worked.

"As Secretary Napolitano has said, once the suspect attempted to take down Flight 253, after his attempt, it's clear that passengers and crew, our homeland security systems, and our aviation security took all appropriate actions," Obama said.

Napolitano received so much criticism for her talk show remarks that she did another round of interviews Monday to say while the system didn't work in preventing Abdulmutallab from getting on the plane, the response system did work after he was subdued.