Ranger from the North

Stephen F. Hayes:

It has been a month since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly killed 289 people on Flight 253. In the weeks since the Christmas Day attack, we've learned some very disturbing things about the Obama administration and terrorism.

We learned that the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, whose agency is responsible for pulling together pieces of intelligence to prevent attacks, went on vacation the day after the attack. We learned that the top White House counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, told him to go. We learned that the White House's initial view of the botched attack -- from Janet Napolitano and Robert Gibbs -- was that "the system worked." We learned that President Obama still believed the attempted bombing was the work of "an isolated extremist" three days after the attack, despite a wealth of evidence that Abdulmutallab had been sent by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). We learned that Brennan was surprised that AQAP was capable of attacking the United States. We learned that Napolitano was surprised by al Qaeda's "determination" to hit the U.S. and stunned that they would send an individual -- not a group -- to conduct an attack. We learned that four top U.S. counterterrorism officials -- Leiter, Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair -- were not consulted about whether to treat Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant or a criminal. We learned that a proposed "high-value detainee interrogation unit," or HIG, does not exist one year into the Obama administration. We learned that Blair, the nation's top intelligence official, thought that it did. We learned that Abdulmutallab was read his Miranda rights less than twelve hours after he was captured. We learned that the FBI interrogated Abdulmutallab for just 50 minutes before he was told he had the right to remain silent and chose to exercise it.

That's an impressive record of incompetence. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs made it worse on Sunday. In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Gibbs was asked about the quick decision to Mirandize the al Qaeda operative. His first response was false, and his second, absurd.

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