WASHINGTON - White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has said national security questions raised by the attempted bombing of a US airlines flight should not spur political finger-pointing. This should not be a tug-of-war between the two political parties, Gibbs said Sunday on NBC. I hope that everyone will resolve in the new year to make protecting our nation a non-partisan issue. The statements came after Republicans have placed blame on the Obama Administration for not stopping a 23-year-old Nigerian man allegedly hiding explosives from boarding a US-bound plane on Friday. Congressman Pete Hoekstra, a Republican ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and Congressman Peter King, ranking Republican member of the Homeland Security Committee, both said Sunday that the attempted terrorist attack could have been prevented if proper security measures had been in place. Gibbs said President Barack Obama has asked for two reviews: one on the watch-listing procedures, some of which are several years old, and the other on detection capabilities. The President has asked the Department of Homeland Security to, quite frankly, answer the very real question about how somebody with something as dangerous as PETN [the explosive used] could have gotten on a plane in Amsterdam, he said. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, along with King and Hoekstra, said Sunday on ABC that he does not understand why the suspect was not on the no-fly list in the first place. Its amazing to me that an individual like this who was sending out so many signals could end up getting on a plane going to the United States, he said on This Week. Responding to that criticism, Gibbs said the suspect was on a watch list, which has about 550,000 names, as a result of the suspects father alerting US Embassy officials in Nigeria about his sons radical Islamic views. But that information was not enough to put the suspect on the narrower selected and no-fly lists, which contain about 14,000 and 4,000 names, respectively. The investigation will look backwards and figure out if any signs were missed, if any procedures can be changed about how names are watch-listed, he said. But again...This is a database that contains 550,000 of those names. Its a huge number. Sen John Barrasso, a Republican, said on Fox on Sunday afternoon that he wants to know how a person on any watch list could get a visa into the United States. Gibbs declined to discuss whether the incident was part of a broader plan of attacks on the US. The administrations reaction to the attack was supported by House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a Republican, who said on Face the Nation that he is very satisfied the president is doing what he ought to do. The president in his response is doing exactly what he should do, Clyburn said on CBS. Terrorists get more benefit from the reaction he caused than the action he takes. AFP adds: Obamas top security official said Sunday there was no indication that the suspect, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, Abdulmutallab was acting as part of a larger plot and warned against speculating that he had been trained by Al-Qaeda. This was one individual literally of thousands that fly and thousands of flights every year. And he was stopped before any damage could be done, US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told CNN. Napolitano also warned that it would be inappropriate to speculate that Al-Qaeda trained Abdulmutallab and sent him on a suicide mission to blow up the Amsterdam-Detroit flight with 290 people aboard. Airport security was stepped up worldwide after the botched terror attack as British police combed premises where the suspect lived while studying mechanical engineering at the University of London between 2005 and 2008. Other law enforcement officials quoted by ABC News and NBC said the suspect also admitted that he had been trained by Al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen and instructed specifically on how to carry out the attack.