It's one of many nightmares parents of rebellious kids sometimes have. Suppose the best parenting does not eventually take hold. Suppose a child falls in with the wrong crowd. A lot of kids go through a time of testing, reacting against authority. They usually come out of it. Its often a part of growing up. But suppose your kid doesn't come out of it.

Occasionally, parents can find themselves in a variant of the nightmare. Suppose you suspect your kid has done something horribly wrong. Or might be about to do something wrong, something harmful to others, something deadly. The father of the Christmas underwear would-be-terrorist lived the nightmare, and did the right thing. He paid a visit to Nigerian officials to say he feared the worst. He ended up at the US embassy, talking to CIA agents. They apparently took him seriously, and a report went through channels.

Bureaucracies are often mysterious in their ways, and the information was shuffled amid wrong spellings and misfiling. After the capture, the President is said to have been furious. Presumably the next ominous report by a parent will be followed by vigorous action.

Al Qaeda takes its own breaches of security with a serious prevention policy. Recruits and their families are warned of the dangers of capture. Americans will torture those they catch, they are told, abusing captives to the point of death. One parent, it appears, did not believe those warnings. We can only hope other parents share that confidence in US conduct.

Republicans are furious at the Obama administration for not taking a harsher approach to the captured Christmas bomber and others like him. American officials have let it be known that the captured young man was not tortured. He responded to humane treatment by spouting information that proved to be useful and important. Eventually he stopped talking. So his interrogators performed what every police drama viewer recognizes as a signal for lasting legal trouble. They read him his rights. At that, he began talking again.

One critic, our own Senator, Missouri Republican Kit Bond is angry for another reason. He is irate because officials actually let it be known that the young man cooperated without being mistreated. Bond insists that “release of this sensitive information has no doubt been helpful to ... terrorist cohorts around the world.” His objection brings to mind two nightmare scenarios.

1. Suppose you are a father who only suspects the possibility that his son might do something awful. Are you more or less likely to go to authorities if you believe they will torture him to get information, as al Qaeda keeps telling you?

2. Suppose your son does something particularly wrong and irresponsible. Suppose he even goes so far as to become an angry, partisan Republican member of the United States Senate.