A subtle but strategically significant point raised by White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan at his press conference right now: The intelligence community didn’t fully understand that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was looking, for the first time, to strike the U.S. homeland; and that in turn didn’t set anyone’s More…
Now this makes more sense. In remarks announcing the receipt of his preliminary reviews of the near-attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, President Obama reiterated that there was a “larger failure of analysis” across the intelligence community in the lead-up to the attack. But this time he emphasized not More…
That didn’t take long. Found in today’s New York Times:
“It is unfair to discriminate against over 150 million people because of the behavior of one person,” Dora Akunyili, Nigeria’s information minister, said Monday, referring Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of
If former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former CIA Director Mike Hayden and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan weren’t enough, here comes Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), chairman of the House’s intelligence oversight board, to blast former Vice President Dick Cheney for not “understand[ing] the difference between talking tough More…
President Obama is scheduled to meet this afternoon at the White House with his top security advisers to get the results of their inquiries into the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed Christmas attack. It’s an open question whether he’ll learn what Mark Hosenball at Newsweek reports:
Two intelligence
From Peter Baker’s New York Times Magazine overview of the Obama administration’s approach to terrorism:
Most of those [Bush holdovers], of course, were in the moderate camp inside the Bush administration, not the Cheney cadre, or like Brennan they present themselves as simply career professionals who followed orders or
Dick Cheney says something, Politico uncritically reports it, Obama administration officials wearily refute it. So goes the ritual. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that John Brennan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the former vice president is either “willfully mischaracterizing this president’s position” or is “ignorant of the facts” when More…
John Brennan, the White House senior adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security, has been summoned to the Sunday shows to discuss what went wrong in the Northwest Flight 253 case and the threat emanating from al-Qaeda’s presence in Yemen. Here are a few things we’ve learned from his “ThisWeek” appearance: More…
Marc Ambinder, Eli Lake and the tag team of Carol E. Lee and Laura Rozen all report on John Brennan’s compromised role directing the Obama administration’s inquiry into how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab evaded the no-fly list. Not only was Brennan the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center More…
In the days after the 2008 election, I fretted over the inclusion of a former senior CIA official named Jami Miscik on the Obama transition team’s intelligence desk. Why? This is why:
Miscik, you see, was head of intelligence analysis during the 2002 turmoil over Iraq’s non-existent weapons of
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