So where are the Truthers (or whatever the latest variant would be)

Newsweek is reporting that 3 days before the Nigerian underwear bomber's foiled attack President Obama received a warning that there were possible holiday period terrorist attacks in the works. Unfortunately the specific threat in question apparent wasn't mentioned in the report.

I am not going to say that President Obama should have magically divined the attack by reading tea leaves or interpreting the shape and color of his morning crap. It isn't fair to him, just like it isn't fair to President Bush when people insisted he should have interpreted a vague warning about al-Qaeda wanting to hijack planes to make the logical leap to the 9/11 attacks.

You know who I am going to blame? The "intelligence" agencies. It appears that 8 years after 9/11 they still haven't figured how to pick up a phone and pass the word about something as specific as a father's warning the day before the attempted attack.

In what has been seen as a possible failure to stop the bomber from boarding a U.S.-bound plane, the alert prompted counterterrorism officials to put Abdulmutallab's name into a database of more than half a million others that the U.S. suspects of ties to terrorism, but they did not put him on the country's no-fly list. The information also was not shared with Yemeni intelligence officials, the Yemen government has said.

Possible failure? How about abject failure. I'm glad we spent all that money setting up a a new Director of National Intelligence office. It's easy to see that it's paying for itself.

What's even worse is that the bomber exhibited many of the same suspicious behaviors that the 9/11 Commission report noted should have alerted officials to the attacks at that time.



Charles Krauthammer sums it up pretty well:

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension.