Unforced Error In The War Against Terror

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AP:

The nation’s top intelligence official says the Christmas Day airline bombing suspect should have been treated as a high-value terror suspect when the plane landed. That would have meant questioning by special interrogators rather than civilian law officers.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (OO’-mahr fah-ROOK’ ahb-DOOL’-moo-TAH’-lahb) was interviewed by federal law enforcement investigators when Northwest Flight 253 landed in Detroit after he allegedly tried to detonate a homemade bomb sneaked through airport security in Nigeria and Amsterdam. Abdulmutallab is being held in a prison about 50 miles outside of Detroit.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told a Senate committee Wednesday that he was not consulted on whether Abdulmutallab should be questioned by the recently created High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

In case you’re wondering, it is considered extremely rude of the Director of National Intelligence to volunteer his opinion unless he’s consulted. So Blair just had to zip his lip, and let the interrogation of Abdulmutallab be mishandled.

Comments

  1. sarabeth says:
    January 21, 2010 at 9:12 am

    Blair’s comments yesterday are even stupider than they looked at first blush:

    Abdulmutallab couldn’t possibly have been questioned by the HIG (High-Value Interrogation Group) because the unit doesn’t exist yet. The task force had recommended it be created to handle the questioning of “high value” Qaeda leaders who might be captured overseas—a criterion that clearly doesn’t apply in Abdulmutallab’s case. But the proposal is still being reviewed by the National Security Council, and the actual unit has not yet been created.

    The specific recommendation, one source said, was to have a collection of intelligence officers and FBI agents who are knowledgeable about the background of the Qaeda leaders and deploy them—along with language and regional experts—as soon as a Qaeda leader was captured. But since Abdulmutallab was not a Qaeda leader, and was captured in Detroit, not overseas, the HIG wouldn’t apply in any case, said the source, who worked closely on the proposal.

    And now an “official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence” is saying — with a perfectly straight face, no doubt — that Blair fully understood that the HIG doesn’t yet exist when he gave his testimony yesterday.