Well at least Obama has the courage to be honest with people, and explain the situation. Also, you may not have heard of things like a hierarchy, beauracracy, agencies ect., so here: Barack Obama is the head of state of a country wiht around 300,000,000 people. In order to efficiently manage this population, and face whatever problems may be faced (ie. economic, military ect.) the government set up a beauracracy, which is essentially all of the departements of government that serve to uphold, implement and create certain laws pertaining to their given area (ie. departement of agriculture), there are also agencies such as the CIA which amongst other things, along with other departements and agencies, aim to gather intelligence. Of course there is a massive amount of intelligence that runs through agency and such, and due to institutional problems levels of cooperation are probably very low. It is probably safe to assume that Obama does not personally review and attempt to solve every possible danger to national security that comes across his desk, as, again, with 300,000,000 people and billions more that essentially hate the USA around the world, these instances are probably fairly common. Obviously the fact that the "dots" were not connected is not Obama's fault, but instead really just is an embarassment that highlights the inefficiencies of certain instiutions.
You should be happy that you now have a president that seems to have a committment towards a transparent, good democracy practically unseen for the past few years.
