Most people probably believe that to perform national security against terrorist attacks on US soil, it would entail some form of “connecting the dots”. Another way of saying this is: one would need to pull together independent pieces of information to build a picture that could be a warning of a threat that could be acted upon to save lives.

But first you have to have the dots that make up the picture of the threat. Finding the right dots to identify a threat is hard enough. It is like looking for a light gray dot in a sea of slightly gray dots. And the the picture takes time to put together, so the dots don’t connect all at once but over time.

You would think that.

But the Obama administration tends to fly in the face of common sense, and it spent a lot of its energy erasing dots before they could be connected. From Feb of this year:

Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time. Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”