…in my post yesterday on air travel security.

A lot better.

An excerpt:

Start with this: Right now, airport security personnel spend most of their time and energy searching for weapons – not just bombs and guns but Swiss Army knives, nail clippers, tubes of toothpaste and bottles of shampoo. What should they spend more time looking for instead? Terrorists.

It would require extraordinarily intrusive screening to spot the kind of “underwear bomb” that Abdulmutallab was wearing. But it should have been simple to recognize that he was a high-risk individual who, at the least, required more scrutiny than the average Midwestern grandmother or Dutch businessman.

After all, Abdulmutallab’s father, a prominent Nigerian banker, warned U.S. Embassy officials in Nigeria that his son was under the influence of Islamic extremists. That American authorities failed to put this information to good use is shocking. Either the system is broken or those running it are incompetent.

Read the whole thing here.