To the people who knew him best, it was obvious for months that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab-- "the underwear bomber"-- was going to be a problem. His father did the right thing, he
alerted Nigerian and U.S. embassy officials six months ago about his son's increasingly militant views and unusual behavior and was surprised to learn that the young man had been allowed to travel to the United States.
link (Link goes to the Pittsburgh Tribune rather than the original Washington Post article so you don't need to be registered to read it.)
What happened?
His father took the problem seriously. I would guess that our embassy took it seriously-- a simultaneous embassy bombing in Kenya and Tanzania was Al Qaida's first big action, before USS Cole and the WTC-- and passed the information along very quickly. Moving a little further along the line,
A U.S. official said the father's warning did not go unheeded. "We didn't sit on the information. It was shared across the interagency," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, referring to the group of U.S. agencies tasked with preventing terrorist attacks.
You can almost hear the ass-covers sliding into place. Somebody maybe did not take the information seriously, and somebody (very likely somebody else) may get in trouble.
But the real culprit has to be the insane nature of the US no-fly-or-fly-maybe-but-only-with-extreme-hassling list.
As long as that list keeps growing without transparency, as long as there are a million ways to get on it, and no simple way to get off of it, how can it be to the purpose? It's useful to the powers that be for harassing political troublemakers and keeping irritable travelers from getting out of line, but as a way to keep an eye on genuine threats to security how can anybody take it seriously? There are just too many names, and by far the greatest number of people who bear those names are not a problem.
What do you think?