More thoughts- and by the way, Olbermann and Maddow, no matter how you feel about them, have been leading the charge with the 'LIHOP' angle.
Props to obama for investigating this - It was 400 days after 911 before Bush begrudgingly opened the 911 investigation... after the widows marched on congress for a year. And people died on 9/11.
Richard Wolfe - NBC - 9:01 PM EST - Investigation at a fact-finding stage. White house looking at it.
Some failures - all of which should have :
• In May, the British government withdrew its student visa for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian who had studied at University College, London, and placed him on a watch list, barring him from reentering the country.
• In August, US intelligence agencies learned of Al Qaeda discussions of an operation against a US target to be organized from Yemen, using a “Nigerian.”
• On November 19, the father of Abdulmutallab, a prominent Nigerian banker, visited the US embassy in Abuja and told State Department and CIA personnel that his son had fallen under the influence of radical Islamists, gone to join them in Yemen, and broken off contact with his family.
• Based on the father’s report, State Department and CIA officers at the embassy informed Washington on November 20 and a security file was opened on Abdulmutallab at the National Counterterrorism Center, the main Washington clearinghouse for terrorism information.
• On December 16, Abdulmutallab visited a ticket office in Ghana and paid $2,831 in cash for a ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight from Lagos through Amsterdam to Detroit, landing on Christmas Day.
• On December 25, Abdulmutallab boarded the flight in Amsterdam with only a carry-on bag for a trans-Atlantic journey. Following standard procedure, the US Department of Homeland Security was notified at least an hour before departure that he was a passenger on the flight.
The White house path: Was intelligence DELIBERATELY WITHHELD - to make someone look bad, or for political gain - that is the question.
Interesting stuff. I'm not buying into a CT... I'm still 70/30 for lazy ass employees. Just human error. But for the White House to ask these Q's is huge.
