It's not too late to properly interrogate Christmas Day bomber Abdulmutallab

(l-r) NCTC's Michael Leiter, DNI Blair, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano

Scott Brown's stunning upset victory in Massachusetts was driven by deep voter discontent with the economy, taxes, wild spending and misguided health care "reform." But terrorism was a big issue, too. Massachusetts voters were disturbed by the Obama Administration's decision to try key 9/11 terrorists in a New York federal court. Then, when the abortive Christmas Day bombing occurred and the culprit, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was quickly Mirandized and given a court-appointed lawyer who advised him not to talk, Brown made it clear that this was no way to protect the nation -- and voters agreed.

For more than three weeks, we were told, hey, no problem, because the FBI interrogated Abdulmutallab and he talked his head off -- albeit only until his lawyer advised him to clam up -- and we gained lots and lots of good intelligence from him. While I was skeptical about this, I gave the Administration the benefit of a doubt. After all, I assumed, Obama's national security team had put their heads together and made a judgment, based on much more knowledge than I have. So I respected that.

Shockingly, it turns out that they did not put heads together. In fact, at Wednesday's Senate hearing into the matter, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testified that he was never even consulted about how to treat Abdulmutallab. Michael Leiter, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano told the Senate that they had not been consulted either.

So who did make the decision to question Abdulmutallab for "at least two hours," charge him, give him his Miranda warnings, and provide him with a taxpayer-paid lawyer? The President? The Attorney General? The FBI Director? It's not entirely clear whether someone higher up in the Justice Department had a hand in it, but FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said that he, too, wasn't in the loop. He explained lamely that FBI agents on the ground made the decision to read Mr. Abdulmutallab his rights and get him an attorney. "It happened so fast that there was no time, really, at that point, where the transfer was made very quickly, given the moving circumstances, to determine whether alternative arrests could or should be made," said Mueller.
So, the opportunity to question a foreign terrorist who tried to blow up an airplane had to be made so "quickly" that no one could lob a call into Blair, Mueller, Leiter, Panella, White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan, National Security Advisor James Jones, someone, anyone? And not one of these people heard about the bombing and thought, gee, maybe I ought to make a few calls and dip my oar in on this decision?

In his testimony, Blair said that he disagrees with the decision to question Abdulmutallab as a criminal suspect and not interrogate him as an ienemy combatant (better late than never):

Mr. Blair...revealed a previously undisclosed disagreement among the Obama administration's top officials over the handling of the Nigerian who is accused of attempting to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

The intelligence chief said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should have been questioned by the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, a special panel established by President Obama.

"We did not invoke the HIG in this case. We should have. Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people. And, you know … that's what we will do now. And so we need to make those decisions more carefully,"

The HIG was established last August in keeping with President Obama's January 2009 executive order barring the use on captured terrorists of all interrogation techniques except those countenanced by the Army Field Manual. It was to be made up of knowledgeable FBI and CIA counterterrorism officers under the FBI's lead.

"That unit was created exactly for this purpose," Mr. Blair added. "To make a decision on whether a certain person who's detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution, or for some of the other means."

So the entire intelligence and national security leadership, apparatus and processes put in place by Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations since 9/11 was forgotten, ignored or side-stepped and none of the responsible officials and intelligence experts weighed in. The matter was left to some Detroit FBI agents as if it were a bank robbery.

The is appalling. But it's not too late. President Obama still has the clear-cut authority to declare Abdulmutallab an enemy combatant, drop the civilian charges, and place him in military custody where he can be questioned by that HIG. No one can say that we won't learn anything more from him than we did in that brief window when FBI agents questioned him, because absolutely no one knows what he does or doesn't know.

Mr. President, it's up to you.

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Pantybomber aftermath: Obama says "system failed," calls it "intolerable" but stands by his national security team!

President Obama says someone "failed to connect the dots." But who?

Speaking yesterday at the White House after meeting for the first time since the Christmas terrorist attack with his whole national security team, President Obama minced no words about failure of the U.S. Government to head off this mortal threat.

President Obama said Tuesday that the government had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot to bring down a commercial jetliner on Christmas Day, but that intelligence officials had “failed to connect those dots.”

“This was not a failure to collect intelligence,” Mr. Obama said after meeting with his national security team for nearly two hours. “It was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”

Obama said he wants action -- now:

I want specific recommendations for corrective actions to fix what went wrong,” said Mr. Obama, who was speaking in the Grand Foyer of the White House. “I want those reforms implemented immediately, so that this doesn’t happen again and so we can prevent future attacks.”

The "failure to integrate" charge seemed to point in one particular direction:

Mr. Obama’s stark assessment that the government failed to properly analyze and integrate intelligence served as a sharp rebuke of the country’s intelligence agencies, including the National Counterterrorism Center, the organization set up after the Sept. 11 attacks to ensure that the government had a central clearinghouse for spotting, assessing and thwarting terrorist threats.

Yet, it appears that no one's head is on the chopping block:

But Mr. Obama insisted that he was not interested in getting into a blame game. White House officials said the president was standing by his top national security advisers, including those whose agencies failed to communicate with one another.

Pointing no fingers himself, Obama told the 20-odd senior national security officials that "he would not 'tolerate' finger-pointing" among themselves.

But here's the serious trouble with that. Mr. President: if everyone is to blame for a major failure to protect the American people, then no one is to blame. Saying you'll hold people accountable is pretty much meaningless, if you don't actually hold anyone accountable!

The "system" that "failed" wasn't set up yesterday and needs some time to work out the bugs. The National Counterterrorism Center was set up in 2004 and placed under the new Director of National Intelligence when the latter office was established in early 2005. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center was created in 2003. And the Department of Homeland Security was established by Congress in 2002. All the other involved agencies have been around much longer.

So if someone "screwed up," in the President's words, who was it? If Obama, Congress and the rest of us don't know, how can we be sure the problem or problems ever get fixed?

Was it the National Counterterrorism Center, which was set up pursuant to the 9/11 Commission's recommendation precisely to connect the dots? Was it the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center which maintains the U.S. Government's consolidated terrorist watch lists? Was it CIA officers in Nigeria or at Langley? Was it the State Department? Did DHS drop the ball? NSA had some intercepts, we're told, but did they share everything? And what about the Brits' report that their intelligence officials shared important information tying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to extremists a year ago? Last but not least, has the White House been on top of potential problems and fixes for them in the year since Obama took office?

No one should let any of this drop unless and until we see the actual people who screwed up directly or indirectly by virtue of their management or policy-making responsibilities pay a price.
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Janet Napolitano, still clueless, still needs to be fired (someone should tip her off about El Al)

Israel's El Al -- the world's most secure airline

In her column in today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd quotes Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano saying this on New Year's Eve:

“I think we do a disservice if we tell people there are 100 percent guarantees. I think we tell them we’re doing everything we can to reduce risk. I think we tell people that they are also part of the system. I mean, the passengers on this plane were a line of defense, the flight crew were a line of defense. So everybody has a shared responsibility here. You can’t just say, well, this government department or that government department’s got the whole shebang.”

You'd think that Napolitano would have learned from her unbelievably mindless statement on December 27th about the Christmas Day fizzled bomb attack that the "system worked." In fact, she was forced to walk back that comment as the President acknowledged for the first time the seriousness of the security breach.

But here she was at a sit-down with Dowd on December 31st telling MoDo and the flying public that the zillions of dollars spent on airline security and other counter-terrorism measures can't guarantee that you'll reach your destination without being blown into tiny pieces, although the government, presumably her department included, is "doing everything we can to reduce risk."

Apart from her continuing defensiveness (and her infuriating attempt to suggest that passengers should be "a line of defense"), this statement is flat out false. The government is not doing everything it can to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on airplanes.

The simplest way to test this is to ask the question still on most Americans' minds nine days after the pantybomber tried to kill 288 innocent people: how did a 23-year-old Nigerian with a Muslim name, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and a bomb in his pants waltz onto a Detroit-bound Delta airliner despite having purchased a ticket in Accra, Ghana, in cash and checked no luggage? And despite a trail of intelligence information tagging him as a risk that included his own father turning him in a month earlier?

There has been a great deal of attention from the media, politicians and the blogosphere to the second question. Rightly so. It's critically important to make sure eight years and huge expenditures after 9/11 that the much-ballyhooed system to "connect the dots" set up under the control of the new Director of National Intelligence, especially the National Counterterrorism Center, works smoothly to bring together and analyze intelligence in a timely and effective way.
In particular, the Christmas case points clearly to a need to broaden the criteria used by the NCTC to put a suspicion person on a list that would result in closer scrutiny in the process of airport screening.

But if we focus attention on the intelligence issues, aren't we missing the obvious and allowing Napolitano to beg off on the ability of her agency to guarantee security? Why wasn't Abdulmutallab screened carefully for no more reason than that he paid for his ticket in cash and had no luggage? Have we not been led to believe a thousand times since 9/11 that these are the sort of indicators that screeners use to trigger heightened scrutiny? And if his Muslim name were thrown into the bargain, wouldn't you want him questioned and/or searched more carefully? Isn't it likely that this kind of -- dare I say it? -- profiling would get us a lot closer to a "100 percent guarantee" than any imaginable further reshuffling of the intelligence community alphabet soup?

That's not "racial profiling," which would have an unsavory quality and unfairly brand all Arabs and South Asians. Rather, it's the approach used by Israel's airline, El Al, which has not had an aircraft attacked since 1968, even though every jihadist in the world would relish bringing down an Israeli airplane. From its inception, El Al's security program has taken into account that it might be targeted by pro-Palestinian leftist terrorists from Europe, Japan and elsewhere. El Al is well aware of the potential threat posed by the Richard Reids and Jose Padillas of the world who don't have Muslim names and carry European or American passports. And employing its behavioral profiling, El Al security once blocked from boarding a young Irish woman whose Palestinian boyfriend had placed a bomb in her effects.

To be sure, El Al takes into account that terrorists are most likely to be young Muslim men, but it's hardly that simple or crude. All passengers are questioned by highly trained personnel who spend little time on old ladies and families travelling with children but focus on those more likely to fit the terrorist profile. The questions are not always the same, denying terrorists the opportunity to rehearse answers. Anomalies do not go unnoticed. For example, El Al would have asked Abdulmutallab not only why he paid for his ticket in cash, but also why he bought it in Accra, who he knew in Ghana, when and why he had been there, and so on. El Al also examines carry-ons closely but doesn't do such silly things as banning shampoo and water bottles. It puts every bag through a decompression chamber that would explode any bomb rigged to go off at a certain altitude.

The only true measure of the US and Israeli approaches to airborne terror is results: no El Al aircraft has been attacked in 42 years, while terrorists have come terrifying close to exploding U.S. airliners twice now, even with the knowledge of 9/11 and all the subsequent known plots against airplanes.

No, Secretary Napolitano, you can't give a 100% guarantee the way things are now -- but you can try a lot harder and you have in El Al a (so far) perfect model to follow.

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