The summary of White House review of the abortive Christmas Day massacre of a planeful of Detroit-bound travelers leaves no room for debate as to accountability. The main points are:
1. Although Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was cited in the Terrorist Identities Datamark Environment (TIDE), he was not placed on the Terrorist Screening Database's watchlist--which would have prevented him from boarding a U.S.-bound aircraft--because he did not "meet the minimum derogatory standard to watchlist." This was due to a failure by National Counterterrorism Center and Central Intelligence Agency personnel to "correlate" all the available derogatory data on Abdulmutallab;
2. An initial search that would have identified the U.S. visa-holding Abdulmutallab with the man his father indicated to the CIA had been "radicalized" was the result of a misspelling of Abdulmutallab's name;
3. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community seems to have appreciated the potential of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
"Failure to connect the dots," "systemic failure," "the buck stops with me" -- such are the phrases produced by the president today to explain the second major act of terrorism -- excuse me, "foreign contingency operation" -- to occur within U.S. borders since his inauguration. As bureaucratic and euphemistic as these phrases are, they certainly beat his earlier non sequitur that Yemen, the country where Abdulmutallab is said to have first thrilled to jihadism, is a poor and backward nation, the implication being that the son of one of the wealthiest Nigerians was driven to set his crotch alight by poverty.
At a press conference a few minutes ago, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano actually managed to say that had Abdulmutallab landed in Michigan, well, then, we'd have surely nabbed him.
I have an op-ed in Monday's Daily News showing how the Underpants Bomber ought to have raised eyebrows while president of the Islamic Society at University College London. Never mind that M15, much like our own valiant CIA, had the goods on him yet failed to impede his itinerary....
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