The gift of time to our enemies

Stephen Hayes:

The White House yesterday leaked the news that the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had begun cooperating with FBI interrogators last week. The Washington press corps quickly declared victory for the Obama administration and suggested that the news vindicated the decision to read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights just 10 hours after he was detained and after just 50 minutes of questioning.

It's good news that Abdulmutallab is talking.

But he started talking five weeks after the attack. Intelligence is perishable. The U.S. government passed on an opportunity to interrogate him at a time when his al Qaeda sponsors in Yemen probably thought he was incapable of talking. And the the fact that he is cooperating now should not obscure the gross mishandling of the incident by the Obama administration.

For those capable of looking beyond the White House spin, the hearing yesterday raised more troubling questions than it answered.

*For days the Obama administration has tried to convince reporters that the Abdulmutallab stopped talking before he was Mirandized. Accounts in both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post in recent days carried that claim. Three sources familiar with the interrogations told TWS that those claims were incorrect. And yesterday FBI Robert Mueller acknowledged that that Abdulmutallab stopped talking "after he was given" Miranda warnings.

*That's important. One of the greatest concerns about the handling of Abdulmutallab is that FBI interrogators -- in their initial 50 minute interview -- questioned him without the benefit of the information the U.S. intelligence community had collected on him in the six months prior to his attack. Mueller confirmed this, saying, "we did not have much information at 3:30," when Abdulmutallab was initially questioned. Mueller testified that they had gathered more information on Abdulmutallab to use in his second interrogation. But when the "clean team" met with Abdulmutallab some five hours later to read him his rights, he stopped talking. So despite the fact that the intelligence community had compiled a dossier on Abdulmutallab -- which included information from his father and from intercepts -- none of that information was used to question him for five weeks after he was detained.

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*Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) asked Dennis Blair about a claim from top White House counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, that he was "surprised" al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula could attack the United States. Feingold wanted to know if we should have been surprised by the attack. "We had some indication that they were planning attacks on the U.S. homeland," he said. What were those indications? Why didn't Brennan know about them?

These new questions and contradictions would have occasioned front-page, fact-checking treatment if they'd taken place under George W. Bush. But not now. Last week, the White House argued that the FBI had gotten everything they could out of Abdulmutallab in their 50-minutes of interrogation. Today, the same White House is boasting about the valuable intelligence they are getting from him. And the White House press corps reports it without skepticism.

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There is more.

I like Hayes. Watching him on the Fox News Special Report panel you can see he is a no nonsense guy.

What is clear is that the administration's lawfare approach has cost valuable time. The underpants bomber's handlers have had time to change their location and scramble the plans they had on the table when he left. When the top counter terror team says we can expect to be hit in the next six months, I suspect is will be from the same people we let get away because of our handling of this guy.