President Obama ordered changes within seven agencies tied to national security Thursday in an effort to beef up intelligence and security about possible terrorist threats in the wake of the failed Christmas Day plot to blow up an airliner.

The changes include more attention on visas issued by the State Department, aggressive pursuit of new airport screening technology and steps to strengthen intelligence sharing among counterterrorism analysts.

The changes come in concert with the release of a summary of the White House's preliminary review of the attempted terrorist attack on Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit. The report concludes that the U.S. government "had sufficient information prior to the attempted December 25 attack to have potentially disrupted" the plot by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)to bring down the plane.

The "most significant failures and shortcomings" by the U.S. government's counterterrorism community before the attack fall into three broad categories, according to the report:

*A failure of intelligence analysis, in which counterterrorism agencies "failed before December 25 to identify, correlate, and fuse into a coherent story all of the discrete pieces of intelligence held by the U.S. Government related to an emerging terrorist plot" organized by AQAP and carried out by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the individual terrorist.

*A failure "to assign responsibility and accountability" for following up information on "high priority" threats and to "run down all leads, and track them through to completion."

*Failing "to identify intelligence" in the government's possession "that would have allowed Mr. Abdulmutallab to be watchlisted, and potentially prevented from boarding an aircraft bound for the United States."

Hours before the changes were announced, the Los Angeles Times reported on administration officials' contradictory assessments of what kind of information about Abdulmutallab's jihadist ties would have been necessary to prevent him from boarding the plane in Amsterdam.

U.S. border security officials said they had learned about Abdulmutallab's radical ties as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed. Senior law enforcement officials said that if the intelligence had been detected sooner, it could have resulted in Abdulmutallab's interrogation – possibly resulting in a decision to keep him off the plane.

But an administration official said late Wednesday that the information would not have resulted in further scrutiny before Abdulmutallab left Amsterdam. Because he was in a database containing nearly half a million names of people with suspected terrorist links who were not considered threats, border security officials would have only tried to question him upon arrival in the United States.

"The public isn't aware how many people are allowed to travel through the U.S., who are linked, who intersect with bad guys or alleged bad guys," a national security official told the Times. "It makes sense from an intelligence perspective. If they are not considered dangerous, it provides intelligence on where they go, who they meet with."