The White House is pushing back on a report suggesting that the U.S. government learned details about the suspect in the botched Christmas Day terrorist attack while he was in the air.

The Los Angeles Times published a report Wednesday saying that U.S. border security officials became aware of the suspect's alleged extremist ties while he was en route from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Detroit, Michigan, and planned to question Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab once he landed.

"As we have indicated before, there were bits and pieces of information about AbdulMutallab available in a variety of areas in the system prior to December 25. There was no new information that emerged when the plane was in the air," an administration official said.

The White House on Thursday plans to release an unclassified report by John Brennan, the assistant to the president on homeland security and counterterrorism, detailing what went wrong and also to reveal new steps intended to thwart future attacks. Obama will make a statement after the review is released, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

The administration source said Customs and Border Protection followed its normal procedures as it prepared for arriving passengers, and by doing so, it accessed the suspect's record in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database.

Since the attempted attack, the intelligence community has scrubbed the database, which has more than 500,000 suspects, adding additional people to U.S. watch lists and no-fly lists as a result.

Officials would not have pulled AbdulMutallab aside for a secondary screening or prevented him from flying in Amsterdam because he was not on the no-fly or terror watch lists, the administration source said.

Obama has demanded to know why the suspect was allowed on the plane, given the information available.

"This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous," Obama told his national security team Tuesday, according to a senior administration official. "We dodged a bullet, but just barely."

According to authorities, AbdulMutallab tried to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear as a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam made its final approach to Detroit. The device failed to fully detonate, instead setting off a fire at the man's seat.

Obama said he wants immediate reforms to correct what he called systemic failures that allowed the attack to happen.

Americans will feel "a certain shock" after reading Thursday's report on the missed warning signs, White House national security adviser James Jones told USA Today.

"We know what happened, we know what didn't happen, and we know how to fix it," Jones told the paper. "That should be an encouraging aspect. We don't have to reinvent anything to make sure it doesn't happen again."

John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence, said it's always easier to piece things together in retrospect.

"There's always a lot of noise in the system, and then you've got to sort out from that noise the signals that are really important. And sometimes we fail to do that," he said on CNN's "American Morning."

"My suspicion in this case is that there wasn't necessarily that much information and that there was quite a bit of ambiguity in whatever was available. In retrospect, it probably looks like we should have been able to figure out what happened," he said.

Negroponte said what interests him is whether the attempted attack is a part of a larger plot.

"I think the important thing right now is that we get as much information from his as we can," he said.

AbdulMutallab is scheduled to make his first court appearance Friday. On Wednesday, a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction; attempted murder within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States; willful attempt to destroy and wreck an aircraft within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States; willfully placing a destructive device in, upon and in proximity to an aircraft within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States; and two counts of possession of a firearm/destructive in furtherance of a crime of violence.

Mostly Republican critics have said AbdulMutallab should have been subjected to military interrogation, rather than receiving the rights of a defendant in the U.S. criminal justice system.

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