GOP Demands Accountability for Christmas Day Attack

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama came under pressure from conservative lawmakers Sunday to hold intelligence officers accountable for a botched Christmas Day attempt to bring down a US-bound passenger.

"Somebody has got to be held responsible," Republican US Senator John McCain told CNN television's "State of the Union" program, saying, "We can't go back to the old Washington kind of routine, we are all responsible, so therefore nobody is responsible."

Obama last week castigated the US intelligence agencies for failures that allowed a 23-year-old Nigerian to board a Detroit-bound Northwest airliner and allegedly attempt to detonate explosives sewn in his underwear.

But he said he was not interested in passing out blame for what he said were system-wide failures. "For ultimately the buck stops with me," Obama said.

But McCain and Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent with hawkish views on US foreign policy, said individuals should be held accountable.

Who specifically that might be should be determined by a government investigation currently underway, said Lieberman, who was with McCain in Jerusalem on a tour of the region's hotspots.

"I think the investigation will show that," he said.

"If human errors were made, I think some of the humans who made those errors have to be disciplined so that they never happen again," said the Connecticut senator, who is chairman of the US Senate's Homeland Security Committee.

"I think some people have to be held accountable for the mistakes, the human errors that the president acknowledged that enabled the Nigerian bomber getting on the plane," Lieberman said.

Another top Republican in the US Senate, Minority Whip Jon Kyl, said he puts the blame for the security breakdown squarely on Obama, not the people who work under him.

"I think the president was right when he said, 'The buck stops with me'," Kyl told Fox News Sunday.

"The problem is he can't be fired right now. So what he's got to do is provide a sense of urgency with these people who work for him," said Kyl, who also was critical of Obama's drive to prosecute terrorists in the US courts, which affords accused terrorists constitutional protections, rather than in the military tribunal system.

"I don't blame them as much as I do him. And I don't blame the people in the CIA, for example, or the counterterrorism center as much as I blame the heads of those groups, who obviously are reflecting the sentiments of the president, which is, 'We can just treat these people as common criminals and forget the intelligence they can provide to us and still win a war'."

The senators made their remarks as Congress returns to work following its winter recess, with the failed terror attack and efforts to boost airport security measures at the top of the political agenda.

Lieberman expressed concern that the recent security slip-ups are part of a growing pattern in recent months.

"In the last year, there have been more than a dozen known attempted terrorists attacks on the homeland of the United States," he told CNN.

"As in any war, when the enemy breaks through your lines, you have got to regroup, you've got to strengthen your defenses. Because the truth is, in this war, we cannot set any goal less than 100 percent success. And that means we have got to close the gaps," he said.

Lieberman's Homeland Security Committee was among several congressional panels that plan hearings on the incident, which has been linked to Al-Qaeda. What the US knew about Al-Qaeda plot

The Senate Intelligence Committee; the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee; and the House Homeland Security Committee all plan to look into aspects of case.

Obama has said that the intelligence agencies missed numerous red flags that could have disrupted the plot, which US officials believe was hatched in Yemen and carried out by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with trying to blow up the Northwest Airlines jet.

Abdulmutallab boarded the flight in Amsterdam with no baggage and a valid US passport even though his father had warned the US Embassy in Nigeria that he was worried that his son had become radicalized.

The Obama administration last week named former CIA director John McLaughlin to head an investigation into the airliner attack, as well as a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood, Texas army base on November 5, 2009 that killed 13 people and left dozens wounded.