Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire (Literally)

How would you react if someone told you that a close family member was killed in a terrorist attack? Now how would you feel if you found out that it was completely preventable. Fortunately, no one was killed in the recent attempt of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane and 278 passengers only ended in his own injury. CNN reports the problems with security in this situation:

"First, the intelligence community knew that an al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen intended to strike the United States and was recruiting operatives for the task, the president said. But intelligence operatives "did not aggressively follow up on and prioritize particular streams of intelligence related to a possible attack against the homeland," he noted.

Second, there was a "larger failure of analysis, a failure to connect the dots of intelligence that existed across our intelligence community."

Third, the intelligence failure contributed to flaws in the country's watch-listing system that resulted in the alleged bomber not being added to the no-fly list."

I recently heard on the news that Umar's father had contacted the airline and warned them of his son, as he had doubts about his loyalty to America. Obama later said: "Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had." Here is a video of him speaking to the public: