Check out this New York Times story from yesterday. It contains a new piece of information about what the intelligence agencies had collected about al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which sponsored Abdulmutallab’s efforts.

In early November, American intelligence authorities say they learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named “Umar Farouk” — the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — had volunteered for a coming operation.

OK now. On Nov. 19, Abdulmutallab’s father told officials at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria he was afraid his son was turning toward extremism and might be in Yemen. Between that; the “Umar Farouk” intercept; and the assorted other pieces of collection that AQAP was trying to hit the U.S. outside of Yemen or Saudi, that seems to hit the “specific derogatory information leading to reasonable suspicion” standard for moving a person-of-interest from the non-specific TIDE database at the National Counterterrorism Center to the Terrorist Screening Database at the FBI, which is the precursor move to putting him on the no-fly list. Mark Hosenball has reported that the Department of Homeland Security only checked TIDE to find Abdulmutallab’s name when Northwest 253 was in the air. Given this new information on “Umar Farouk,” perhaps they shouldn’t have needed to.

Michael Leiter, director of the NCTC, will be explaining all this to Congress in a battery of hearings this week. Let’s see what his explanation is.

A procedure used to place suspects on U.S. terrorism “watch lists” is so rigorous that even a Kenyan man who tried to murder a Danish cartoonist on New Year’s Day with a hatchet and a knife was not immediately added onto a “no fly” list maintained by the U.S. government, according to a U.S. national-security official.

The official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that before his name was added to a U.S. no-fly list?consisting of about 4,000 people banned from boarding U.S.-bound airplanes?the case of Muhidin Gelle, who broke into the house of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard on Jan. 1 and tried to kill him, had to be reviewed by U.S. officials to ensure that it met official standards for inclusion in such a database. This meant that even though Gelle was already under arrest in Denmark, having been caught and shot by Danish police as he reportedly threatened them with his axe, there was a lag in adding him to the U.S. aviation blacklist, while American officials made sure that his behavior met the appropriate standard. (After his arrest for the attack on Westergaard, officials in Kenya also reportedly linked Gelle to an earlier plot to attack Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while she was touring Africa.)

Now, who knows, maybe the fact that he was arrested meant there was little reason to put Gelle on the no-fly. But really now.

Good news for Obama: on August 28-31, 63 percent of respondents had either a “great deal” or a “moderate amount” of confidence in his approach to terrorism. Now… 65 percent of Americans do. The numbers for those who lack confidence in him haven’t changed, either. Fifty-seven percent of respondents approve of Obama’s handling of the Abdulmutallab incident, even as an equal number think he should be tried in military court

Taken together, it would appear from the poll that Obama has more room to maneuver on counterterrorism than his Department of Homeland Security’s recent profiling moves indicate.

“What he [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did – one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama,” Giuliani said. “Number two, he should correct the things that Bush didn’t do right. Sending people to Yemen was wrong, not getting this whole intelligence thing corrected.”

We had no domestic attacks under Bush! Except for that really big one where 3000 people were murdered. And then the never-solved anthrax attacks that followed. Except for that, nothing. And “we’ve had one under Obama” — I guess the charitable reading is that he’s scoring Fort Hood a terrorist attack; either that or he’s saying a failed attempt on blowing up Northwest Flight 253 actually succeeded. Giuliani, the noun-verb-9/11 politician, is now a 9/11 denialist.

You actually need to give President George W. Bush credit for this. The Bush people did a wonderfully effective job of making it verboten in mainstream political discourse to consider the deaths of 3000 Americans on 9/11 in any sense Bush’s failing. To this day, there are people on the right who believe 9/11 is President Clinton’s failure; many of them would never dream of saying the system that Obama inherited from Bush was responsible for the near-miss on Flight 253.

Counterterrorism officials have moved the names of dozens of people onto the terror watch list and the no-fly list after reviewing a massive government database of suspected terrorists.

An intelligence official says the government scrubbed thousands of names in its database after an attempted bombing aboard a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. Officials focused on people from countries with ties to terrorism. The official wasn’t authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.

Presumably this will be updated, because right now the piece doesn’t explain what new procedures are in place to move a suspect onto the watchlist. For a brief primer, see this post of mine from last week.

But how about former Bush CIA and National Security Agency chief Mike Hayden? Asked on the same program about Obama’s counterterrorism record, Hayden replied, “I am heartened by the fact that the president consistently says we are at war with al-Qaeda its affiliates.” Former Bush secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff echoed Hayden. Expect neither Cheney’s behavior nor Politico’s to change even slightly.

That’s not quite what happened — the administration has admitted breakdowns in the system — but Hoekstra’s on a roll.

We are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation–the restructuring of American society.

There are a number of ways to go after Obama, but this one doesn’t really make any sense. As Cheney must know, having been near the Republican Party’s helm during the 2002 and 2004 elections, it’s always in the president’s political interest to hype the threat posed by foreign or domestic enemies. For example, we now know that the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush upped the “color code” threat level at multiple points during the 2004 presidential campaign, and that it weakened John Kerry’s bid. And one of the most notorious quotes from Obama’s White House was Rahm Emanuel’s 2008 comment that “you never let a crisis go to waste.” Politically, it would be in Obama’s interest to make lots of statements about an eternal war on terror, then pivot and use his capital on “social transformation.”

I’m not saying the administration’s message problem here (and we’re talking about message, since Cheney seems most concerned that Obama doesn’t talk about “war” enough) is a brilliant strategy. Starting with the party’s failure to groom credible opposites to Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), continuing with the decision to let Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) keep his Homeland Security chairmanship, and compounding with DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s spin, the administration’s rhetoric has been doomed from the start. The idea that Obama doesn’t care about terrorism because he’s too interested in social democracy, however, is equal parts illogical and nonsensical.

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Erroll Southers, an experienced, highly-qualified nominee, continues to be held up in the Senate by someone who obviously puts process ahead of progress.  If TSA is to become the kind of nimble, responsive organization the American people deserve in times like this, it will need a Senate-confirmed administrator.  If nothing else, the events of last week highlighted this lack of leadership.

Remember: DeMint is holding up the new TSA chief not because of any concerns over Southers’ qualifications. He’s holding Southers up because Southers is too pro-labor. Because the last thing you want for the safety of the nation’s airports is for the individuals responsible for their security to earn a fair wage.