THANK YOU PRESIDENT OBAMA - NOW REMOVE NIGERIA FROM THE TERROR WATCH LIST.

President of United States, Barack Obama officially acknowledged the failings of his intelligence machinery when he said this, “The bottom line is this - the US Government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots.”

This was indeed not a failure by the American intelligence machinery not to collect intelligence, but a failure to comprehend the intelligence reports at their disposal. That failure, as mentioned in my previous article in my blog, potentially would have caused several losses of lives. Not to mention the lives of families and friends that would have been devastated by the loss of dear loved ones. Yes, President Obama, you were damn right, not to mess words, "a screw up that could have been disastrous", the failure is definitely “not acceptable”.

Mr. President, we indeed narrowly dogged a bullet, not by failure of the Nigerian intelligence community, but by your well financed and equipped intelligence agencies, who failed to integrate and fully comprehend the intelligence before them. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab would not have been able to transit in Nigeria without being arrested had your intelligence agencies, namely the CIA shared what they knew with their Nigerian counterpart. To now label Nigeria as a country of interest on US terrorist watch list, thereby criminalising and subjecting a 150 million peace loving Nigerians to degrading search, due to a singular act of an individual, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab who from his teenage years have been a product of foreign influence – obtained his education abroad, influenced and indoctrinated abroad, from UK, UAE, Egypt and then Yemen, is unfair, unjust and against natural or equitable justice. Outside of what we knew, you held your hand up, your head upright, looked at me and millions of other people in the world and admitted the failings of your intelligence community. In view of that fact, it is my submission that it will be honourable of you to now remove Nigeria from your terrorist watch list. Over forty nine years of Nigerian’s history, there has never been an act of terrorism against the outside world, except for this once by Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab and if not, but for, the failures of your intelligence community, the said individual would have been on a ‘no-fly’ list and Nigeria would have continued to maintain her good name in the international community.