Dubbing the botched Christmas Day attempt to blow up a US airliner as a screw-up, an angry President Barack Obama has taken his intelligence brass to task for failing in a potentially disastrous way to connect the dots despite enough advance warnings.

In a highly unusual public rebuke, a grim Obama told the Americans that the government had enough information to foil the attack ahead of time, but the intelligence community though trained to do so had failed to connect the dots.