I think this is disgraceful:

Nearly two years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, key federal agencies have not consolidated a dozen separate "watch lists" intended to keep terrorists out of the country, even though sharing that kind of information might have caught two of the suicide hijackers before they carried out their plot.

The Department of Homeland Security says it is working to combine lists of potential security risks maintained by at least nine agencies, but it has no timetable for finishing the job. Officials say critics underestimate the complexity of the task, especially technical problems involving computers and databases not designed to share information. They add that it is important to verify accuracy among lists that often name the same person with different spellings, birth dates or hometowns.

--USA Today

Well, yeah, it's important to do the job right. But I thought the whole point of having can-do macho men like President Flightsuit running the country was that they don't go around whining and making excuses -- they just set a priority and get it done.

But hey, it's not as if anything really terrible can happen if the information isn't consolidated....

Last month, a congressional report criticized the CIA for waiting until August 2001 to give the FBI detailed information about Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. The two men, who were hijackers on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, were placed on a watch list. But by then they had lived for several months in San Diego.

No biggie, right?

Let's let this guy haave the last word:

"It's not a surprise that with 12 different lists held by nine different agencies that there have been difficulties in consolidating those lists," says Asha George of the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security.

"On the other hand, it's been two years."