"Pride, excess of food, prosperous ease"

The not so "very, very smoothly" handled case of Flight 253 on Christmas Day brought to mind the prophet Ezekiel's assessment of Sodom before her fall: "She . . . had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease . . ." (16:49). Is it possible for a bureaucracy to suffer the same triple ailments? The leaner an organization, the better things run. A bloated organization is a walking time bomb, for several reasons: The more people in charge, the more diffuse and confused the lines of responsibility, and the less each person feels the indispensability of his role. Also, the bigger a group, the more places there are to hide. (My friend says the first day on the job at a Detroit car plant in the 1970s, the union guys got him in a corner and told him to go hide somewhere.)

There is a feeling that surely someone else has "got" this. Someone else must be taking care of that complaint by a Nigerian banker to the U.S. Embassy that his own son is a "security threat." That's not my job, sighs the put upon embassy official; I'll just fill out a report form and send it to D.C. A sleepy Washington official, perhaps hung over, and having argued with his wife this morning, routinely files the embassy official's report into the black hole of a database called, impressively, the "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment." Done.

The equally beleaguered official at the National Counterterrorism Center outside of Washington---whether suffering from a touch of "pride, excess of food, or prosperous ease"---does nothing with the information. After all, there's so much of the stuff. And so many other analysts. Somebody else has "got" this. Must be.

The British, who have denied Abdulmutallab's visa, say it's not their fault they didn't tell the United States---we should have asked them. It's not the FBI's fault they had no man at the Nigerian's U.S. meeting. Nor is it the CIA's fault they didn't tell the FBI. And surely the State Department is not to blame for not revoking the visa of a young man with a name like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (yikes! racial profiling!) who paid cash to fly one way to America, with no bags. That's not the airline's fault either.

There's an old Twilight Zone episode where a guy dies and at first thinks he has gone to heaven. The fawning party girls are for the getting, the blackjack odds are always in his favor, and the getaway car always outruns the patrol car. By the end of the episode, our latest resident in hell is bored out of his mind. What he wouldn't give for a little challenge, like in the good old days.

I wonder if that's how radical cleric Al-Awlaki feels. He told us on his website in October: "COULD YEMEN BE THE NEXT SURPRISE OF THE SEASON?" He was known to have had contact with the 9/11 hijackers. He corresponded with U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal M. Hasan at Fort Hood. He was practically doing cartwheels in a clown-orange carnival suit. What's a terrorist to do for a challenge nowadays?

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