The New York Times is on to this story, very fast and very detailed.
A dispatch from Washington by Scott Shane, Eric Schmitt and Eric Lipton reveals that the father of the would-be killer had told American officials (in Lagos, maybe) "several weeks ago" of the involvement of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, his son, with terrorist and extremist Muslim organizations.
So the Muslim fanatic from Nigeria, whose father turned information about him in to the American embassy in Lagos, was on the long list, not the short one. Like Mohammed Atta. And Major Hasan. And presumably lots of others.
I dimly remembered that Mohammed Atta and at least three of his brothers (a big word in Islam) had been known to security agencies at least a year before 9/11 as "likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States." This quote is from an August 9, 2005 article written by ace- investigator-of-intricate-matters Douglas Jehl for the New York Times.
The Thing Around Your Neck
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(Knopf, 218 pp., $24.95)
In “Jumping Monkey Hill,” the most wicked story in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new collection, a group of young writers selected from all over Africa have gathered for a workshop at a fancy resort outside Cape Town--”the kind of place,” thinks Ujunwa, the representative Nigerian, “where . . . affluent foreign tourists would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa.” The workshop is run by a white couple of a familiar type: liberal expats who proclaim their attachment to their new home a bit too loudly. (“White people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same--condescending,” Adichie writes in another story.) The wife compliments Ujunwa’s bone structure and asks if she is descended from royalty: “The first thing that came to Ujunwa’s mind was to ask if Isabel ever needed royal blood to explain the good looks of friends back in London.” The smarmy husband makes lewd remarks to the women and speaks pompously of his own authority on Africa.
Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
(Little, Brown and Company, 309 pp., $27.99)
