FBI's Christmas Bomber Treatment May Have Cost Terrorism Intelligence

Lack of full communication between the Justice Department and other key members of the intelligence community immediately following the arrest of would-be airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab reveals counterterrorism officials in disarray during the Christmas Day incident.

Abdulmutallab was quickly funneled into the civilian trial system by the FBI after he was arrested and taken from Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, where his attempt to blow up the plane with an underpants bomb was foiled by passengers and crew. According to one report, even after a brief consultation between Justice Department and U.S. intelligence officials, there was never any consideration about whether he would be tried in a civilian court or held for a military tribunal.

Reportedly, he made incriminating statements and described his activities and training in Yemen by an al-Qaida offshoot to U.S. Customs officers and later to an initial team of FBI agents who did not inform him of the rights of domestic criminal defendants.

But following his surgery, when a second team of FBI agents arrived, he did receive the customary warnings and promptly invoked his right to silence.

Last week, Congress heard testimony that neither the director of the FBI, the secretary of the Homeland Security Department nor the directors of the National Counterterrorism Center or the National Intelligence Agency were consulted before Abdulmutallab was charged as a criminal defendant.

This breakdown in communications after the incident equals or surpasses the breakdowns that allowed the would-be bomber to get on the plane in the first place.

The Washington Post reported there was a briefing by the Justice Department of some other officials of National Intelligence after the arrest.

But there was no discussion about whether the bomber should be detained longer and treated as an illegal enemy combatant rather than a civilian defendant or whether additional intelligence specialists should have been dispatched to question him, it reported.

It may be that more intelligence could have been obtained from Abdulmutallab.

The harshest criticism of the administration's response came from its own director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, who said there should have been a process in place to decide these issues at a higher level before the charging decision was made.

Blair is right. There ought to be a process in place before an incident occurs, rather than finger-pointing and second guessing afterwards. The Obama administration must put such a process in place immediately.

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