WASHINGTON -- The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day
airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane -- that
can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush
administration -- but what happened afterward when Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the
U.S. government.
After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose,
reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to
remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial
information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and
dispatched him.
We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had
been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary
of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the
FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the
director of national intelligence (DNI).
The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably.
Obama's own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by
the HIG, the administration's new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
Perhaps you hadn't heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his
presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney
interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In
August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed
in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.
Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted
National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had only been
conceived for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of
highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack
on American soil?
It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not
deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! I
suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country's
best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo
miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational
HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence
that might save American lives.