SOUNDS LIKE PRE 9-11 – AT 8:52 A.M. ET:  After 9-11 we learned there'd been serious warnings about Middle Easterners learning to fly at American flight schools, under unusual circumstances.  The warnings had been ignored.

As Yogi Berra said, this looks like déja vù all over again:

THE CIA was tracking a person of interest known as "The Nigerian" - who was in fact airline bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - as early as August, CBS News reports.

The connection between “The Nigerian” and Mr Abdulmutallab was not made when the 23-year-old's father contacted the US embassy in Nigeria in November to warn them of his son’s radicalisation.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the intelligence agency did not have Mr Abdulmutallab’s name until November.

And they did not know he was “The Nigerian” until after his attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day.

"In November, we worked with the embassy to ensure he was in the Government's terrorist database-including mention of his possible extremist connections in Yemen,” Mr Gimigliano said.

COMMENT:  There will be investigations, as there were after 9-11.  Will anything change?  We don't know, but if you were a government employee looking at this administration's attitude toward terrorism – I mean "man-made disasters" – how encouraged would you be to work harder?

December 30, 2009