It is always surprising to me that the government can uncover the tiniest piece of information but can’t seem to grasp the big things like this. They can tell you what someone ate for lunch on any given day but can’t keep up with a terrorist who moves all around the world. And to not tell Yemen this guy was a hazard in their territory. That was consciousless. I suppose even though Yemen is a muslim country, they are an ally, like all our other allies and need to taken down and/or directly or indirectly.

We barely tolerate this in children.

In supposedly mature adults…?!!!

My bad; we voted out the adults last November.

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What we saw with the State Department was a full up example of a Douglas Adams’ style “Somebody Else’s Problem Field” in action.

The U.S. embassy in Nigeria did not emphasize the warning in its report on the Xmas Day bomber, after his father turned him in, because Abdulmutallab was then;
1) A resident of Britain,
2) On a student visa, and
3) Did not currently reside in Nigeria,
Thus the American embassy in Nigeria did not consider him a priority threat, because he wasn’t a threat in Nigeria.

Thus we have a classic case of the “SEP Field” in action, doing its normal job of destroying important information.

Here is the Wikipedia entry on the subject.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else's_Problem

Somebody Else’s Problem
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Somebody Else’s Problem (also known as Someone else’s problem or SEP) is an effect that causes people to ignore matters which are generally important to a group but may not seem specifically important to the individual. Author Douglas Adams’s description of the effect, which he playfully ascribed to a physical “SEP field”, has helped to make it a generally recognized phenomenon. The label is now widely used to focus public attention on matters that might have been overlooked and, less commonly, to identify concerns that a depressed individual should ignore. It has also been employed as trivial shorthand to describe factors that are “out of scope” in the current context.[1]