Murphy's Law Of Counter Terrorism

The longer I live, the more I believe in old sayings and adages like Murphy's first law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong". In fact, when it came to the Christmas Day Crotch Bomber, even the bomb itself went wrong.

When it comes to the United States security side of that bombing incident, Murphy may have been better off writing the words "Everything that can go wrong will go wrong" because, truly, everything did go wrong from our government's standpoint. Short of wearing a sign on his body, every possible warning sign about the Crotch Bomber was ignored by the Feds:

• His father -- a high level Nigerian Banker -- warned the U.S. government about his son; going all the way back to November of 2007. He didn't just warn us once, we now know he warned us three times.
• The CIA had this guy under surveillance since August.
• He met with and communicated with the same Imam that had been in contact with the Fort Hood shooter.
• The British government denied him a student visa because of his radical beliefs.
• He purchased a one-way ticket using cash.
• He had no luggage.
• He carried no passport and had no authorizing visa to enter the United States.

It is amazing to me that we now hear calls for full, naked body scanners at our airports as if a scanner was needed to catch this guy. All that was needed was for our government to pay attention to just "one" of the above warning signals and, then, there wouldn't have even been an attempted Christmas bombing.

Quite frankly, body scanners might be a great technology but, they're extremely expensive. A well-trained bomb sniffing dog could achieve the same result and for a lot less money. And the dog can do it a lot faster than having a human try to interpret what they are seeing on an imaging screen.