Anyone wish to reasonably discuss some of the issues in the article ( please read the entire article if so). The point, a larger one being the prez. oversees the small stuff but commands the bigger picture ala mechanics of prevention in the larger sense.
The lack of intel or usefulness of intel gleaned before he lawyered up?
Should he have been able to, no, let me say allowed to lawyer up?
What Does the Detroit Bomber Know?
The president's job is not detecting bombs at the airport but neutralizing terrorists before they get there.
By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY
There was much to celebrate in the providential combination of an incompetent terrorist and surpassingly brave passengers and crew who saved 288 people aboard Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day. There is a lot less to applaud in the official reaction.
Well-deserved mockery has already been heaped on the move-along-folks-nothing-to-see-here tone of the administration's initial pronouncements—from Janet Napolitano's "the system worked," to President Obama's statement that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an "isolated extremist." This week brought little improvement.
The president acknowledged that the plot had been hatched in Yemen, but not without adding the misleading statement that Yemen faces "crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies." That Yemenis have to cope with "crushing poverty" is irrelevant here. Abdulmutallab is the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker. Other jihadists, including the physician who blew himself up and killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan last week, and indeed the millionaire Osama bin Laden, prove that poverty does not beget terrorists. "Deadly insurgencies" is a half-truth, which omits the fact that the Yemeni government itself has supported al Qaeda and continues to harbor at least two people—Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi and Fahad Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso—involved in the bombing of the USS Cole.
Then, too, there was the unfortunate metaphor chosen by a senior intelligence adviser to account for why a conspiracy helped along by at least two Guantanamo alumni had not been discovered before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane. There was, he said, "no smoking gun"—a clue one would expect to find after disaster strikes, not before. There were, as it happens, many smokeless but redolent clues lying about before the plane took off. These included Abdulmutallab's father's warning to the State Department that his son was being radicalized and had gone to Yemen; the one-way ticket purchased for cash; no luggage; and intercepted communication referring to a plot involving "the Nigerian" in Yemen.
But it is not so much these gaffes as what they appear to reflect that gives serious cause for concern. Even as the initial spin was in progress, Abdulmutallab was chattering like a magpie to his FBI captors about having been trained by al Qaeda and about there being more where he came from.
Braggadocio aside, he was certainly aware of who had prepared the potentially deadly mix that was sewn in his underwear, who had trained him, where the training had taken place, whether there was in fact a South Asian man described by two other passengers who helped him talk his way on to the plane, and a good deal more. Such facts are valuable but evanescent intelligence. The location of people—and with it our ability to find and neutralize them—is subject to rapid change.
The REST of the article at;
Michael B. Mukasey: What Does the Detroit Bomber Know? - WSJ.com