Since a suicide bomber’s attempt to bring down a Detroit-bound airplane on Christmas Day, we’ve heard a lot about the counterterrorism community’s supposed “failure to connect the dots.” As a result, directives have been issued calling for improved information sharing and analysis, and agencies were ordered to review their procedures.

Such bureaucratic self-evaluation and narrow focus on the “dots,” however, misses a much larger, more central piece of the puzzle – that a legalistic culture, driven by litigious activists, has infected and impaired our war on terrorism.