I didn’t get a substantive response from the National Counterterrorism Center or its director, Michael Leiter, to yesterday’s Senate report singling it out for failure in the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab case. Instead, I got pointed to Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s Wheatena-flavored reply. That might reflect the More…
It’s so dry it borders on passive-aggressive. “Immediately following the attempted attack, Director Blair initiated reviews to identify [intelligence community]-wide shortcomings and potential solutions,” reads a statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, responding to this afternoon’s declassified Senate report on systemic intelligence failures More…
A long-awaited report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the failed bombing attempt aboard Northwest Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab essentially finds that the nation’s premier center for terrorism intelligence didn’t do its job ahead of the Christmastime danger.
“Prior to 12/25,” reads the report, spearheaded by More…
In the wake of the attempted Times Square bombing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is urging Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to include what she considers affiliated extremist groups — the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network — on the State More…
Following a classified briefing on the attempted car-bombing of Times Square for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the panel’s leadership said there was not yet definitive evidence tying the Pakistani Taliban to the failed terrorist attack believed to be perpetrated by naturalized U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad.
But committee chairwoman More…
In a surprise development, the CIA just announced that longtime and well-respected Deputy Director Steve Kappes will retire from the agency in May. Kappes was the initial favorite of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to be CIA director, and Leon Panetta’s ultimate decision to retain Kappes as his deputy was More…
- The Obama administration is working toward immigration reform, according to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Department of Homeland Security. Napolitano told an audience yesterday at Arizona State University: “We’re going to keep pushing this until we get it over the finish line,” according to The Arizona Republic. The paper More…
Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-American believed to be an al-Qaeda asset in the U.S., pleaded guilty today to conspiring to attack the New York City subway system with a chemical explosive. “The combined efforts of the law enforcement and intelligence communities disrupted a major plot, and there is no doubt that More…
The Washington Post has an interview with Attorney General Eric Holder in which Holder, for the first time, appears to give himself breathing room to abandon federal criminal trials for the 9/11 conspirators:
“At the end of the day, wherever this case is tried, in whatever forum, what we
A few weeks ago, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, gave conservatives a flicker of hope for a high-profile Democratic dissenter on the Obama administration’s plans to try the 9/11 perpetrators in civilian courts. She didn’t come out and float such a possibility, but More…
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