A big oops
Overshadowed this week by the victory of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts was a hearing held the next day on how the alleged Christmas Day Bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was turned over to civil courts having never been interrogated by President Obama’s new High Value Interrogation Group.
According to Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, who spoke at a Senate hearing:
“That unit was created exactly for this purpose,” Blair testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “We did not invoke the [High Value Interrogation Group] in this case. We should have.”
The information above comes from the Chicago Tribune. According to the article by Greg Miller, the FBI did question Abdulmutallab for a few hours and then turned him over to the civilian court system.
But Blair
…and other top U.S. counter-terrorism officials, including Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and FBI Director Robert Mueller, testified that they were never consulted on the decision to give Abdulmutallab access to an attorney or be advised of his right to remain silent.
This High Value Interrogation Group, according to the article, isn’t working quite right yet. It is still in its formation stages. It replaced the old system used in the Bush years where things like sleep deprivation could be used to aid in interrogation. Too bad the new system wasn’t ready when they shut down the old one.
And I haven’t even mentioned the breakdowns that allowed Abdulmutallab to get on that jet in the first place.
President Obama took the blame for this one, and rightly so. I hope they’ve figured out a better way.
