WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama today lauded the arrest of a Jordanian man accused of plotting to blow up a Dallas office tower, weighing in on the case for the first time.

"We've seen your success here in America in the last several weeks," Obama told FBI, CIA, homeland security and other operatives during a visit to the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Va. "You've stayed vigilant. You watched for signs. You stitched together the intelligence. You worked together, across organizations, as one team. And then – arrests in Denver and New York, and still more in Illinois and Texas, have made us safer."

The FBI arrested Hosam "Sam" Smadi, a 19-year-old immigrant who had been in the country on an expired tourist visa and working at a barbecue restaurant in Italy, Texas, on Sept. 24.

At an evidentiary hearing Monday in a Dallas federal court, the FBI said Smadi had made a seven-minute videotape for Osama bin Laden earlier this year, though it did not disclose the contents.

Smadi faces charges of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. The FBI says he drew attention by posting comments on extremist Web sites in January, indicating he wanted to commit an act of terrorism.

FBI and homeland security officials, in private briefings to members of Congress authorized to receive classified information, have said the Smadi case was not related to several others exposed at nearly the same time. It wasn’t clear from Obama’s remarks whether he was suggesting any link or pattern.

The Illinois case involved an American whom the FBI said admired the Taliban and wanted to blow up a courthouse but who, like Smadi, apparently lacked training or bombmaking material, other than what undercover agents provided. The New York case is more troubling; federal authorities say that Najibullah Zazi, a Denver-area shuttle bus driver who had received Al Qaeda training, had bought materials needed to make bombs he planned to set off on New York City commuter trains.

"I say to every American: You see the headlines, but here are some of the people who help write them, who keep you safe," Obama said after a classified briefing at the counterterrorism center, which was set up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to improve coordination between federal agencies, and state, local and foreign colleagues. "The record of your service is written in the attacks that never occur, because you thwarted them, and in the countless Americans who are alive today, because you saved them."