What if?
There have been a number of egregious cover-ups by the US government in our history. The most famous proven cover-up in US history was even nominated for an Academy Award (it lost to Rocky). Cover-ups apparently can be quite entertaining. (But cover-ups are terribly hard to prove — the principal reason that Watergate was undone was that the Associate Director of the FBI was a secret informant to the Washington Post.) And the list of them can be very long, according to some folks who let their imaginations wander.
But you don’t have to let your imagination wander too far to ask: what if Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had successfully ignited his undies on NWA 253 and brought it down? AQAP would of course claimed credit for the destruction of the aircraft. But what would US government officials have said? The administration’s first position on the incident was that the “system worked.” Would they have changed their tune as quickly, absent the smoking undies and the eyewitness testimony about the “alleged” actions of the “suspect?”
Had the attack been successful, facts would have been few at first. Would we have been counseled not to rush to judgment until all the facts were in — a process that could take months as the aircraft was painstakingly reconstructed? Would the President have been cool or hot? Would the gut reactions of President Bush and President Obama have been the same or 180 degrees apart? What if the stakes were by many orders of magnitude much higher? What if?