A senior U.S. official briefed on the matter tells ABC News that the phone call prompted the father to contact Nigerian intelligence, fearing that his son might be planning a suicide mission in Yemen. The Nigerian officials brought Mutallab directly to the CIA station chief in Abuja Nov. 19.

I hope everyone doesn't get so caught up in the Abdulmutallab incident they fail to focus on the bigger picture, which is figuring out what al Qaida Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is planning next and how to weaken AQAP in Yemen.

U.S. military strikes are not a solution, just a temporary bandaid. Neither is imprisoning their sympathizers. They will only emerge more radicalized and determined. Neither is freezing the release of the other Yemenis at Guantanamo, which will also fuel U.S. hatred.

Gregory Johnson, a former Fullbright scholar now at Princeton, and co-author of the Yemen blog, Waq al-Waq, offered this view in September (pages 8 -11).

The United States must learn that its insistence on seeing everything through the prism of counterterrorism has helped to induce exactly the type of results it is hoping to avoid. By focusing on al-Qa`ida to the exclusion of nearly every other challenge, and by linking almost all of its aid to this single is