Connecting the Dots and the Christmas Plot

“We slipped up.”  That’s what Patrick F. Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State for Management, said at a Senate hearing last week about the Christmas day bomb plot and the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

He has a gift for understatement.

But the real question isn’t whether we “slipped up”—everyone knows we did.  It’s rather how and why we did.  The truth is that this was a failure of policy, not of law.  We did it to ourselves. 

Read the Article at the Harvard National Security Journal