President Obama said Tuesday that the United States government had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot to bring down an airplane on Christmas Day, but intelligence officials “failed to connect those dots” that would have prevented the young Nigerian man from boarding the plane in Amsterdam.
“This was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had,” Mr. Obama said after a two-hour meeting with his national security team at the White House. He added, “We have to do better, we will do better and we have to do it quickly. American lives are on the line.”
Send them back to Yemen.
Also worthy of public scrutiny is why Abdulmutalib ever received an unlimited multiple-entry U.S. visa in the first place, and in London, of all places. Given that the potential for Nigerian visa fraud must be enormous, Abdulmutalib (or any foreign, non-British visa applicant in London) should have been told to apply at a U.S. consulate nearest home, Lagos in this case.
Was Abdulmatalib’s visa issued for tourism, for business, for studies? And what convincing bona fides did Abdulmutalib present to the visa officer in London to prove that he had: (A) a legitimate reason to travel to the U.S. and (B) a permanent home in Nigeria to which he intended to return from his U.S. visit.
And what documents were presented to make this case; affadavits of support from U.S. citizen relations/friends? letters of endorsement from their congressmen? an acceptance letter from an American university/educational institiution? offer of employment by an American company? recommendations from British sources?
In other words, visas to Nigerians, in London, should not be issued lightly. What were the factors that moved U.S. authorities to give him this visa and were they justified in doing so? We have a right to know about this initial failure in our security procedures.