Friday, January 22, 2010

Fuster Cluck


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In a fiery Senate hearing, the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, said that the handling of the Christmas underwear bomber has been irreparably botched.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should have been held and questioned by an elite team of interrogators from a new agency called the HIG ("High-value Intelligence Group"). Except the HIG isn't fully operational yet. And the HIG is designed to question only overseas terrorists, because no one had thought about what to do if a terrorist was captured on U.S. soil.

Abdulmutallab was given his Miranda rights and a lawyer without anyone clearing the decision with the heads of national security agencies. If, however, the decision to treat the attempted bombing as a purely criminal matter by an (ahem) "isolated extremist" came from a higher governmental official, the Whitehouse is keeping mum about it.


Bonus: Obama's top intelligence officials deploy "finger-pointing and clueless shrugging" in the War on Terror...



UPDATE: It has now been revealed that the decision to treat Abdulmutallab as a common criminal and provide him with a lawyer, while circumventing notification of our nation's top intelligence officials, came directly from Attorney General Eric Holder.

Why Holder didn't want Abdulmutallab questioned, or whether Barack Obama was informed of (or behind) this decision is currently unknown...but demands immediate and thorough investigation.

8 comments:

drjim said...

Your tax dollar at work....

Mike aka Proof said...

Amateur hour at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Suzy said...

Obama doesn't want to offend his Muslim brothers....

Buzz Bannister said...

Is Obama and his Administration really that stupid or are they simply bent on our destruction?

Stilton Jarlsberg said...

Readers- Yes, the ineptitude is just jaw-dropping. Not long after the underwear bomber was captured, Janet Napolitano said that it had never really occurred to her (and her team) that an attack could be carried out by one man. Hadn't she ever heard of the shoe bomber? Just why DOES she think we all take our shoes off at the airport?

But then came the revelation that no plans were in place for our intelligence agencies to question a high value terrorist on U.S. soil. They hadn't even conceived of the possibility of an attack on U.S. soil, again raising questions about whether these people even remember 9/11.

When Janet Napolitano said "The system worked," everyone was dumbfounded at her definition of "working." But now we find out the real nightmare is that there was no system.

Frightening.

The Dark Knight said...

in-com-pe-tent

Anonymous said...

Wow, I'm getting my news from Hope n' Change. I only heard some of that before. I think were way beyond the September 10th mentality.

Stilton Jarlsberg said...

nakedliberty- Yes, something stinks very badly here. The September 10th mentality would explain being unprepared... but Holder's action is more like "aiding and abetting."

Did Obama tell Holder to "make this go away" so the attempted Christmas bombing wouldn't distract from the healthcare push? Was it simply understood by Holder that anything pointing to the existence of real terrorists had to be buried to sustain the fiction that there is no "war on terror?"

All we can do is speculate, because the Whitehouse - like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - is keeping quiet.