Pete Hoekstra Approves of Obama’s Yemen Decision

The GOP congressman and candidate for governor of Michigan is quick with his (faint) praise on Twitter:

Counterterrorism Center Has Only ‘Eight or Nine’ Middle East Analysts

President Obama is scheduled to meet on Tuesday afternoon with 20 of his security advisers to receive the results of two inquiries into how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck a bomb onto Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. One of those advisers is Michael Leiter, the Bush-appointed director of the More…

Holt Blasts Cheney on Terrorism

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…

U.S. Court System Outmatches 9/11 Conspirator

From Reuters:

Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in a U.S. court on criminal charges related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, lost a bid on Monday to overturn his guilty plea and his sentence of life in prison.

A U.S. appeals court rejected arguments by Moussaoui,

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GOP House Candidate: Battling Liberals More Important Than Defeating Terrorism

From The Minnesota Independent:

Allen Quist, a Republican who is seeking to defeat Rep. Tim Walz in southern Minnesota’s First Congressional District, told attendees of the Wabasha County Republicans Christmas Party in mid-December that beating the “radical” liberals in Washington, D.C., is a bigger battle than beating

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The Post-Northwest Flight 253 No-Fly Expansion Begins

The Associated Press reports:

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

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Quotes From John Brennan That Liberals Won’t Like

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

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Would This Stop the Next Abdulmutallab?

The Transportation Security Administration’s new post-Northwest Airlines Flight 253 rules, per The Washington Post:

All travelers flying to the United States from other countries will face increased random screening, and all passengers from more than a dozen terrorism-prone nations will be patted down and have their carry-on bags searched,

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So Much for Dick Cheney’s Meme

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’s Intelligence Waiver

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…