So should hordes of airline passengers submitted once again to even longer, more thorough searches of their carry-on baggage, their clothing — even their bodies — be grateful to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for squeezing the barn door shut after a dangerous horse had gotten through? Or should they wish upon her what another high-ranking Albuquerquean, Louis Caldera, got for his national-security goof?

Caldera, a former University of New Mexico president, was White House military director when the Barack Obama administration began. But then he had a brainstorm: fly Air Force One and a fighter escort over New York for a photo shoot calculated to impress America and the world.

Caldera's failure to tell even the mayor of our greatest city, still under the shadow of the World Trade Center assault, about the harmless stunt got Caldera fired four months after he took office.

Napolitano's failure is one of omission: Umar Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian whose own dad warned our country and others of his radicalization and irrational behavior, was on a British watch list when he boarded a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Here he was merely one of half a million — literally, 550,000 — considered by our authorities to have some alleged terrorist connection. He held a multientry United States visa.

So on Christmas Day, with the plane over Michigan, he tried setting off the same kind of explosive passengers caught another guy trying to ignite from his shoes in the wake of the 2001 attacks. It would have been a terroristic "perfect storm" if his bomb hadn't misfired — and if courageous passengers and flight attendants hadn't pounced and subdued him.

All's well that ends well, was our heimat commandant's response: "The system worked," declared Napolitano on Sunday. Well, yes — if you we can always count on someone catching the bad guy before the plane blows up ...

Wait, did I say that? I must've been taken out of context, she declared yesterday — just before her miffed boss announced that he intends to find "all who were involved and hold them accountable." By "involved," he presumably means those involved in negligence. In that case, if the buck doesn't stop at his desk, it does at his Cabinet secretary's. Since Obama's is the one that includes a private airliner with no security-police frisking and the latest round of groan-inducing delays that go with it, Napolitano might want to start clearing hers out.

As for the president, who went to great lengths to tie Afghanistan to al-Qaida terrorism as a big reason for sending more soldiers there, so much for that excuse. He did include Yemen, where the latest villain appears to have been trained and outfitted, as one of several countries of concern — but it might as well have been Mexico, or any of our own internationalist cities, such as Detroit. What the president fails to acknowledge in the alarms he's sounding about this or that terrorist-training nation is that they could be trained in the basement of the Old Ebbitt Grill, a stone's throw from the White House — or anywhere else, for that matter.

What's needed, the Christmas case tells us, is the same thing New Mexico law-enforcers lack: instant interagency coordination. That shouldn't be so difficult in this computer age. If we don't already know who's being barred from flying by our great ally Britain, what else don't we know? The big issue here is competence — or lack thereof.

"An extensive review," Napolitano tells her grateful nation, is under way. What a relief.