THE CHRISTMAS-DAY AIRLINE BOMBER – EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT – AT 9:02 A.M. ET:  Just when we thought the Keystone Kop mentality that allowed the bomber to board his flight had been fully aired, along comes this.  More Keystone.  More Kop:

WASHINGTON – The would-be Christmas Day bomber boarded his flight in Amsterdam to frigid Detroit with no coat — perhaps the final warning sign that went unnoticed leading up to what could have been a catastrophic terrorist attack, lawmakers were told.

Congress got its first behind-the-scenes look Wednesday at the botched airline bombing and officials said the security failures were even worse than President Barack Obama outlined last week. It remains unclear, however, how those failures will be fixed.

Very, very unclear.

"He was flying into Detroit without a coat. That's interesting if you've ever been in Detroit in December," New Jersey Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said after a briefing by presidential counterterrorism adviser John Brennan.

National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair and National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter briefed the House Intelligence Committee behind closed doors and Brennan took questions from the House in overlapping sessions Wednesday.

And...

"There were more dots crying out to be connected than I realized," Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview. "If any two of the dots were connected, it would have moved the organization to quickly connect the other dots. An improvement or good luck in any number of areas probably could have broken this wide open."

COMMENT:  We worry about the next bomber, who is certainly in the pipeline.  There were also plenty of unconnected dots in the Fort Hood case.  We need a better approach to dots in our intelligence services.

January 14, 2010