USELESS CYNICISM
A Senate Intelligence Committee staffer says that in recent
updates to the committee, and in briefing individual Senators,
national security and national intelligence officials have
indicated that they have gained “no actionable intelligence” from
interviews with the so-called “Christmas Day” or “underwear
bomber,” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. This, after
White House officials had told reporters that Abdulmutallab was
cooperating with law enforcement and national intelligence
officials, and that the information was helpful.
“The information they may have drawn out of him after his
family arrived was probably more than a month old and there just
wasn’t very much of it to begin with,” says the Senate staffer in
relaying what his bosses were being told. “The Obama
Administration has indicated that information they pulled from
him on the night of the arrest may have been more helpful, but
that intelligence was largely focused on his activities leading
up to the attempted bombing.”
The Senate updates late in the week came after the White
House held a briefing for reporters about the Abdulmutallab case
early last week, making public the fact that the Department of
Justice has allowed some of the man’s family into the country to
encourage him to cooperate with federal law enforcement
officials. Such a media briefing involving what the Department of
Justice had indicated was an “ongoing national security matter”
was considered unprecedented for an ongoing terrorism
case.
The White House claimed the briefing was to “contextualize”
the testimony and comments made earlier in the day before the
Senate committee by Director of National Intelligence
Dennis C. Blair, CIA Director Leon
Panetta and FBI Director Robert
Mueller. But after those comments were made public, the
FBI requested that the White House not hold the briefing.
That press briefing was held anyway because it was
intended, according one White House official, to quell the
continued criticism of the Obama Administration’s handling of the
Abdulmutallab case: the fact that the President chose not to
speak about the attempted terrorist attack until more than 48
hours had passed, that senior Administration officials chose to
essentially treat Abdulmutallab as a U.S. citizen and to provide
him with Miranda rights, and to treat the case as a standard
federal criminal case in Michigan.
“It’s one thing for someone to go out and say that we’re
getting intelligence from someone like Sheik
Mohammed,” says a former Federal Bureau of Investigation
official. “It’s another to have what amounts to a propaganda
event because you’re getting tired of being criticized in the
media and you want the media to give inaccurate information to
the American public.”
Adding to the confusions, U.S. Attorney General
Eric Holder had announced that it was his
decision alone to go the criminal justice route with
Abdulmutallab, rather than the national security route. “No one
here believes that,” says a Department of Justice attorney in the
Criminal Division. “We all know Eric is falling on his sword for
the guys up the street at the White House. Something this big
doesn’t take place without input and final sign off from the
Executive Office of the President.”
In a New Yorker interview, Holder continued to
give the Obama Administration cover, saying, “What we did is
totally consistent with what has happened in every similar case”
since 9/11. “There’s a desire to ignore the facts to try to score
political points. It’s a little shocking.” But current and former
Department of Justice and National Security Agency officials
dispute that claim, pointing out that over the past nine years, a
vast majority of those cases involved either joint sting
operations or arrests prior to any attempted acts of terrorism,
and that in the case of foreign nationals on U.S. soil, different
strategies were used to elicit intelligence.
“It’s one thing when you nab a U.S. citizen attempting to
buy or sell Stinger missiles with the intent of committing a
terrorist act. Or arresting a student from Dubai here on a visa
who has been gathering intelligence for al Qaeda for a possible
terrorist act,” says a former Department of Justice official.
“It’s another when you have a guy who actually tried to blow up a
plane, and had recent interaction with an increasingly
influential wing of a terrorist network we’re trying to
understand.”
On Sunday, the White House continued its attempts to
downplay the solidifying impression that the President and his
national security team are soft on terrorism. White House
counterterrorism chief John Brennan said on
Meet the Press that he had briefed four Republican
congressional leaders on the bombing attempt, had informed them
that Abdulmutallab was cooperating with the FBI, and that they
were aware of the legal strategy the Administration would
undertake moving forward.
“Our understanding was that it was a two-minute phone
call,” says a House Republican staffer with ties to the Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence. “And to claim that call might
have revealed a strategy moving forward would not be accurate by
any stretch. When have these people proven they have a strategy
about anything other than playing politics with everything they
touch?”
The American Spectator is calling on President Obama to
try Mr. Abdulmutallab under a military tribunal. Sign the
Petition.
REQUIRED READING
Republican National Committee and state Republican Party leaders
were buzzing about a pamphlet being handed out during the party’s
Hawaiian winter meeting written by House Republican Policy
Committee Chairman Rep. Thaddeus
McCotter.
Entitled, “We the People:
Wide Awake for Our Newest Birth of Freedom,” the pamphlet lays
out a conservative philosophical roadmap for the 2010 election
cycle.
“We got briefed on this program the party and the House and
Senate Republicans are doing to come up with another Contract for
America, with all the focus groups and polling and such,” says a
state party representative from South Carolina. “Why waste all
that money when you’ve got a something that maybe is a bit too
wordy, but pretty much lays it out the way conservatives and
Republicans think on the issues? I liked it, and the state party
is going to use it.”
The policy committee posted the pamphlet on its website
sometime before Christmas, and neither the committee nor McCotter
have been promoting it.
