Editor's Letter: Say again, who is accountable?

last updated 8 January 2015

“Ultimately, the buck stops with me,” President Obama declared last week, after meeting with the heads of the many agencies that played a role in allowing a known Islamist militant to board a U.S. airliner with explosives in his underwear. It’s nice of the president not to scapegoat some underling for the nearly calamitous failure to prevent Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding the airplane. But as Republicans were quick to point out, Obama isn’t about to quit or be fired, so that still leaves the small matter of accountability. Calling the failure “systemic,” as the White House has been doing, obscures the fact that the Christmas Day incident was made possible by actual human beings—public servants who failed miserably at their jobs and therefore should lose them.

If heads are to roll, there is no shortage of contenders. Abdulmutallab’s father told the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria several weeks ago that he was concerned his son was becoming radicalized, but neither the embassy nor the CIA managed to get him on a no-fly list. The National Counterterrorism Center, created specifically to “connect the dots,” spectacularly failed to do so. And let’s not forget those Transportation Security Administration officials who failed to react to a notification that a foreign passenger had bought a one-way ticket to Detroit with cash and checked no luggage. With Obama insisting he’s not interested in “finger-pointing,” Democrats have been reminding us that President Bush didn’t fire a single official in the wake of 9/11. When Democrats are citing Bush as a role model, something certainly must be amiss.