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In a fiery Senate hearing, the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, said that the handling of the Christmas underwear bomber has been irreparably botched.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should have been held and questioned by an elite team of interrogators from a new agency called the HIG ("High-value Intelligence Group"). Except the HIG isn't fully operational yet. And the HIG is designed to question only overseas terrorists, because no one had thought about what to do if a terrorist was captured on U.S. soil.
Abdulmutallab was given his Miranda rights and a lawyer without anyone clearing the decision with the heads of national security agencies. If, however, the decision to treat the attempted bombing as a purely criminal matter by an (ahem) "isolated extremist" came from a higher governmental official, the Whitehouse is keeping mum about it.
Bonus: Obama's top intelligence officials deploy "finger-pointing and clueless shrugging" in the War on Terror...
UPDATE: It has now been revealed that the decision to treat Abdulmutallab as a common criminal and provide him with a lawyer, while circumventing notification of our nation's top intelligence officials, came directly from Attorney General Eric Holder.
Why Holder didn't want Abdulmutallab questioned, or whether Barack Obama was informed of (or behind) this decision is currently unknown...but demands immediate and thorough investigation.
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