But the situation moved from unbelievable to outrageous in Chicago, where al Soofi was able to check his bags on a flight headed first to Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., and then on to Dubai and Yemen. But al Soofi did not board the D.C.- Dubai-Yemen flight. Instead, he boarded an entirely different flight, the United Airlines flight to Amsterdam. Did al Soofi originally buy two different tickets, which would have put him in two different places at once? Or did he change one ticket at the last moment? And if he changed his ticket at the last moment — oddly switching his destination to an entirely different continent in the 11th hour — then why weren’t his checked bags taken off a flight headed for the nation’s capital first? Most confounding of all is the fact that the TSA has no follow-up protocols. Why wasn’t the TSA in Chicago notified by the TSA in Alabama that a suspicious passenger named Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi (who was to headed to Yemen, the State Department’s newest, biggest al-Qaeda concern) was coming through O’Hare with checked bags packed with knives, box cutters, and mock bombs? The TSA’s annual budget costs taxpayers $8 billion dollars a year. What are they spending those dollars on? How many suspicious moves does it take to catch a terror suspect in a federalized airport today?

Clearly, there is considerably more going on with this story than law enforcement officials are currently saying.