Over the past two days President Obama, while on holiday in Hawaii, addressed the American people about the attempted terrorist attack on an airplane December 25. In his speech December 29, Obama said he has ordered officials to review the government’s terrorist watch list system and air travel screening processes to “find out what went wrong, fix it and prevent future attacks.”

Preliminary findings of these reviews will be presented to the president by tomorrow, although more thorough reviews will likely take weeks. Already the reviews have indicated that problems occurred in this case, Obama said.

“We’ve achieved much since 9/11 in terms of collecting information that relates to terrorists and potential terrorist attacks,” Obama said. “But it’s becoming clear that the system that has been in place for years now is not sufficiently up to date to take full advantage of the information we collect and the knowledge we have.”

Obama said his duty is to not only hold intelligence authorities accountable, but also ensure that they have the tools they need to keep America safe. A text of his speech is available on the White House Web site.