“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.
