THIS IS DEAD SERIOUS – AT 10:18 A.M. ET:  The actual New York Times headline reads:

New Teams Connect Dots of Terror Plots

No, I mean it.  That's the actual headline.  Apparently, in the ten years since 9-11, the federal government has decided, after many committee meetings, that a special team is needed that has a particular knack for dot connecting.

As you know, dot connecting is a rare specialty – only three Ph.D.s were given in the subject last year, and we're lucky to have people who know just how to do this.  From The Times:

WASHINGTON — The nation’s main counterterrorism center is creating new teams of specialists to pursue clues of emerging terrorist plots as part of a rapid buildup that will sharply increase its analyst corps, perhaps by hundreds of people over the next year, intelligence officials said Friday.

Nice to see some urgency.

The action by the National Counterterrorism Center is one of the furthest reaching by the government so far to address the failings of several federal agencies in the case of a 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with boarding a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day with explosives sewn into his underwear.

Michael E. Leiter, the center's director, made the breathtaking announcement:

“We’ve been very good at chasing down those threats that come out of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr. Leiter told the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week. “We’re going to be better now at chasing down those small bits of information that come out of Yemen or North Africa or East Africa.”

We hope they're better at chasing down the info that comes out of Yemen or Africa than they were in chasing down the threat bursting out of Afghanistan on 9-11.

Time flies, doesn't it?  Why didn't this happen nine years ago?

January 30, 2010