Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab

On February 2nd, NBC correspondent Pete Williams announced Breaking News during the 5 PM ET edition of Hardball: the Christmas Day Bomber, Umar Abdul Mutallab, was giving fresh, actionable information to the FBI which the United States was in turn "aggressively chasing down."Less than an hour later, this NewsBuster blogged on the matter, wondering whether by leaking the news, "the Obama…

Has the Obama administration compromised national security by leaking the fact that it's obtaining actionable intelligence from Umar Mutallab?  On this afternoon's Hardball, Justice Department correspondent Pete Williams reported the breaking news that Obama admin officials have told him that the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Mutallab, is providing actionable, fresh intelligence.Williams stated that…

Just how little confidence is there in the ability of the Barack Obama administration to fight terrorism? So little that even liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is now mocking the pathetic efforts of this administration in his latest column:There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured…

President Obama's handpicked intelligence czar blames officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice for failing to permit the gathering critical intelligence from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called Underwear Bomber who attempted to down a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009.What's more, neither Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair nor FBI director Mueller or Homeland…

On Saturday’s Fox News Watch, as FNC correspondent Douglas Kennedy appeared as a member of the show’s panel, after host Jon Scott’s introduction to the show’s first segment – which involved President Obama’s response to the underwear bomber – Kennedy characterized Scott’s introduction as sounding "like it's written by Dick Cheney in his bunker." Complaining that he was ideologically outnumbered…

Chris Cuomo says there's no proof Mutallab will talk less as a lawyered-up criminal defendant than as an enemy combatant.  Suggestions to the contrary are just politics. George Stephanopolous manifests the same problem his old boss did: he doesn't know what the meaning of "is," is.  Steph claims Mutallab "is" singing.  But reports are that the would-be mass-murderer was singing—but isn't any more…

Appearing as a guest on Thursday’s Your World with Neil Cavuto on FNC, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch – known for being a relatively centrist Democrat – chided President Obama for being reluctant to use terms like "war on terrorism" or "Islamic extremists," and, when host Cavuto pointed out that Obama had managed to improve attitudes toward America in the Muslim world, Koch sarcastically shot…

As has been noted here in the recent past, it isn't just government entities that are a little slow on the uptake when it comes to identifying radical Muslim preachers as accessories to terrorism - it's also the media.  Consider the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a man who has consistently shown ties to terrorist attacks, yet who had gone predominantly under the media radar as nothing more than a…

Bill Kristol has set forth a stinging indictment of the Obama admin's handling of the war on terror. His two-minute monologue on today's Fox News Sunday delineated a devastating bill of particulars:It was a mistake to treat Abdul Mutallab as a criminal defendant rather than as an enemy combatant: "Mr. Brennan [Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser who appeared earlier] said to you that we're very…

Representative Pete Hoekstra recently indicated that the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 should be a clue that helps the Obama Administration ‘connect the dots' on terrorism.While that remains unlikely with an administration more obsessed with right-wing extremists, man-caused disasters, and the impeccable success of our counterterrorism systems, perhaps it's time to start…

Like a football coach trying to explain away the trouncing his team just took by building up the opponent, Janet Napolitano is seeking to diminish the Obama administration's NWA 253 failure by exaggerating the cunning of the Christmas Day plot.The hapless Homeland Security head has a 679-word piece in today's USA Today basically promising to do better.  She begins with this line [emphasis added]:…

Quite the culture war on Morning Joe today . . . The combatants were Pat Buchanan and Spencer Ackerman of the lefty Washington Independent. The topic was the treatment of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab.  Buchanan wanted the budding terrorist classified as an enemy combatant in order to extract the maximum amount of information from him. Ackerman, in ACLU mode, favored having young Umar tried in…

It took a tough question from Matt Lauer, but after having laughably claimed that "the system worked," DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has now conceded the obvious: that the security system that permitted Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board NWA 253 with explosives "failed miserably."On Today and in other interviews this morning, Napolitano attempted to use her own ignorance as a shield.  Each time…