Whatever’s happening with the Baradar capture, President Obama convenes his national security team today for what I think is the first all-hands meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan since the December West Point speech. The (very long) guest list:
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
Oh, man. I could be missing something. But I can’t remember a White House response to a GOP legislator as straight-up harsh as what spokesman Nick Shapiro told Greg Sargent after Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, called for John Brennan to resign More…
Building off his Sunday retaliation at Republican critics over the Mirandization and (successful!) interrogation of would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan goes much further in a USA Today op-ed.
It begins as an aggressive defense of the utility of law-enforcement approaches More…
Evidently out of patience with attacks on the Obama administration for reading would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights, John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief, called out the Obama administration’s conservative critics for what he described as selective outrage.
To the Obama administration’s pattern of sticking up for itself on its counterterrorism record, add this:
None of about 48 Guantanamo Bay detainees released or transferred elsewhere by the Obama administration has participated or been suspected of participating in subsequent “recidivist” activity, compared with 20 percent of about
John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, has completed his review of the November shootings at Fort Hood. The White House has just released a public version of his findings, all of which are about improving information sharing across the government — a stark contrast with Brennan’s Flight 253 More…
One of the more sensational aspects of the Northwest Airlines Flight 253 review is that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s name was inconsistently spelled by State Department officials after the would-be bomber’s father informed officials at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja about his son’s increasing radicalism. According to the White House review More…
Apropos of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan’s comment yesterday that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had made a new strategic decision to attack the U.S. homeland, Leah Farrall, an al-Qaeda expert and former terrorism adviser to the Australian federal police, says it’s nothing new. “I watched AQAP congeal More…
Today has been filled with news of National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter taking a vacation during the aftermath of the failed attack on Northwest Flight 253. But not only did President Obama say he couldn’t single any one individual out for failure, his counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, actually stepped More…
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