Anwar Al Awlaki's Capture May Attract More U.S. Terrorist Attacks

Al-Awlaki's Father Says Son Is Not Osama Bin Laden



His anguish apparent, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki told CNN that his son is not a member of al Qaeda and is not hiding out with terrorists in southern Yemen.

"I am now afraid of what they will do with my son, he's not Osama Bin Laden, they want to make something out of him that he's not," said Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

As recently as Sunday, Yemeni officials including provincial governor Al Hasan al-Ahmadi claimed that al-Awlaki was hiding out in the southern mountains of Yemen with al Qaeda.

"He's dead wrong. What do you expect my son to do? There are missiles raining down on the village. He has to hide. But he is not hiding with al Qaeda; our tribe is protecting him right now," insisted al-Awlaki's father in an exclusive interview with CNN.

"My son is (a) wanted man, he's cornered, that's the problem I am facing," al-Awlaki said.

The al-Awlaki family comes from the large and powerful Awalek tribe of southern Yemen. It has many connections to the government of Yemen, including the country's prime minister, who is a relative of the al-Awlaki family.

Recently, Yemeni officials have also claimed that Anwar al-Awlaki had contact with Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab during his stay in Yemen in late 2009. When asked if his son met with the man charged with trying to blow up a U.S.-bound plane on Christmas day, al-Awlaki's father said it's not likely.

"I have no idea but I don't believe it," he said.

But the United States has independent intelligence verifying that AbdulMutallab met with al-Awlaki somewhere in southern Yemen before the Christmas Day bombing attempt, according to a U.S. security official with knowledge of the intelligence.

Even if al-Awlaki is hiding out with his tribe in the mountains of southern Yemen, the official added, authorities have no doubt that he is a member of al Qaeda and is now one of the top five or six operatives in Yemen for the terrorist organization.

The official said al-Awlaki's transformation from inspirational leader to operational recruiter for al Qaeda was first picked up in the early part of 2009.

This official also noted that the United States believes he is still involved in trying to recruit more bombers to launch attacks.

His father, the elder al-Awlaki, is an accomplished academic and had held several positions within the Yemeni government, including minister of agriculture. He first went to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar in the late '60s, and his son Anwar was born there in 1971.

Al-Awlaki says he is doing what he can to coax his son out of hiding, but does not want to jeopardize his son's life.

"I will do my best to convince my son to do this (surrender), to come back but they are not giving me time, they want to kill my son. How can the American government kill one of their own citizens? This is a legal issue that needs to be answered," he said.

"If they give me time I can have some contact with my son but the problem is they are not giving me time," he said.

Al-Awlaki acknowledged his son has espoused some controversial views but all of them, he said, would be protected by freedom of speech provisions in the American Constitution. He denied his son has done anything to encourage terrorists to commit violent acts.

"He is a preacher, you cannot tie Anwar to acts of terrorism," said al-Awlaki.

Al-Awlaki's name surfaced in November when U.S. officials revealed he and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan -- the U.S. Army psychiatrist accused of fatally shooting 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5 -- had exchanged e-mails. The intercepted e-mails between the two, officials said, had not not set off alarm bells.

The cleric recently told Al Jazeera's Arabic-language Web site that he met Hasan nine years ago while serving as an imam at a mosque in the Washington, D.C., area. He said he lauded the Fort Hood attack because it was aimed at troops, whom he accused of fighting an unjust war against Islam.

"It is a military target inside America and there is no dispute over that," Anwar al-Awlaki said. "Also, these military personnel are not ordinary; they were trained and ready to fight and kill oppressed Muslims, and commit crimes in Afghanistan."

When asked why his son would praise Hasan, Nasser al-Awlaki said he did not agree with his son's views.

"I don't think that's right what he said about Major Hasan's actions, but my son has been very upset by the violence against Muslims," said al-Awlaki.

Al-Awlaki does concede his son's views did seem more radical after he spent time in a Yemeni prison from 2006 to 2007 for suspected ties to terrorism. He was released for lack of evidence.

"They put him in jail for 18 months and I detected a change after he got out of prison, he began to get away from the mainstream," al-Awlaki said.

The father also warned that the aggressive hunt for his son and al Qaeda operatives in Yemen using missile strikes will only serve to recruit more members to the organization.

"I don't want those American cowboys to destroy Yemen," said al-Awlaki before conceding that the hunt for al Qaeda in Yemen is now a global concern.

"He has been wrongly accused, it's unbelievable. He lived his life in America, he's an all-American boy. My son would love to go back to America, he used to have a good life in America. Now he's hiding in the mountains, he doesn't even have safe water to drink," al-Awlaki said.



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Sources: CNN, CBS News, Facebook, Google Maps

Sue Myrick Warns U.S. Of More Terrorist & Jihadist Attacks

Call me a prude if you will but I think American citizens regardless of their Political Affiliation or Ethnicity should listen to what Rep. Sue Myrick is saying about Terrorism and take it very seriously.

Sue Myrick is NOT trying to place Fear in our hearts or encourage Discrimination against Muslims.

Instead Rep. Myrick is simply trying to make us aware of what's going on behind the scenes of our Government as it relates to how they handle Terrorism threats.

After all she is a U.S. Congresswoman who has access to Classified Gov't Documents that the average American citizen doesn't.

For the record it really shouldn't matter if Pres. Obama calls Al-Qaida Operatives "Extremists" or if Sue Myrick calls them "Radical Islamists".

A Terrorist is a Terrorist!

Can we please stop the Semantics?

This isn't an I.Q. Test or a Spelling Bee.

Fighting the War on Terror needs to be a concerted, bi-partisan effort don't you agree?

Watch her videos below and you will see why what she states has merit.

I'd rather be safe than sorry.

Thank God Umar Mutallab's Terror Attempt failed on Christmas Day.

I truly believe someone onboard Flight 253 was praying for God's Divine Protection. Thus the failed Terror Attempt.











Sue Myrick Videos Warn Of More Terrorism


"The American people aren't being told the truth about Terrorism", according to U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick.

In the wake of a failed attack on a plane bound for Detroit in December, she warns on two new videos that citizens haven't been told that some people are willing to blow themselves up to hurt Americans, that jihadists exist who want to destroy Western democracies, that extremists are being radicalized through the Internet.

Myrick, a Charlotte Republican, launched an ongoing YouTube video series last week. In the first video, called "Beyond Terrorism: The Whole Story," she warns that extremists may live in our midst, perhaps even in our government.

"You're not being told the whole story about why these incidents are happening," Myrick tells the camera. "This is something that nobody ever tells you."

Myrick, a member of the House Intelligence Committee for nearly a year, has long been worried about extreme Islam and jihadists. She held a roundtable last summer billed as the Moderate Muslim Summit on how to bring more anti-extremist views to the government's attention, and she has called for an investigation into a Pro-Muslim Advocacy Organization.





In an interview with The Charlotte Observer, Myrick said Friday she wants to educate the public about the larger terrorism picture, to help them connect the dots between an airplane near-miss here in the United States and the web of organizations abroad.

"This isn't something that's going to go away. The radical Islamists have long-term plans, and they're willing to wait," Myrick said. "Unless you're really educated on this, it sounds pretty far-fetched and wacky."

Myrick said the videos weren't about broad-brushing the Muslim religion, but about starting conversations among Americans and teaching them to be watchful in their communities.

So far, Myrick has posted two related videos on her congressional website. On them, she warns that the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt outside Detroit and the mass shooting last year at Fort Hood, Texas, are mere "tips of the iceberg" in what she calls a Jihad against America.

"There's a lot of radicalization on the Internet today," she says on the first video.

"There is radicalization in the mosques; there are people who have been indoctrinated into the same line of thinking who are in positions in our government."

In the second video, called "Fort Hood: What You're Not Hearing," Myrick's views are interspersed with four experts, including a cloaked former FBI agent, about the mass shooting by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan in November.

Among them is Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a frequent Fox News commentator who has advocated airport screening based in part on religion and ethnicity. In the Myrick video, he tells an unseen interviewer, "Maj. Hasan was an unequivocally Islamist terrorist committed to jihad."

Upcoming videos may include snippets from last summer's roundtable, or about the Muslim Brotherhood organization, Myrick said Friday.





"I call it a conversation with America," she said. "I want us as a country to talk about this, because it's like the elephant in the room. We need to face the problems that we have."



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Sources: McClatchy Newspapers, Charlotte Observer, TPM, CBN, CAIR, Youtube, Google Maps

Peter King Says Terrorists Don't Deserve Same Legal Rights As Americans

Rep. Peter King says the Obama Admin. should stop sending mixed messages about Terrorism, stop granting Terrorists the same legal rights as American Citizens, that Terrorists should be tried as Enemy Combatants and explains why Congress should pass the "Keep Terrorists Out of America Act".

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Christmas Day Would-be Bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, offers up a Not Guilty Plea at his first U.S. Criminal Court appearance.

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Sources: MSNBC, GOP.gov

Democrat Leaders Rally To Save Janet Napolitano's Job

Democrats Plot To Protect Janet Napolitano


Democrats worried about protecting the homeland in wake of the Christmas Day terror plot are also working to protect one of their own: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

With at least seven congressional committees investigating the failures behind the terror plot, Democrats are carefully gaming out the testimony of Napolitano to spare her from the worst of the GOP criticism.

First, they may shield her from the Senate Judiciary Committee, keeping conservative senators like Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and others from bashing her in a major public forum. She may instead appear before the Senate Commerce Committee, where some expect her to receive gentler treatment.

Next, the White House is working on Sen. Joe Lieberman, the mercurial chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, to avoid an ugly clash in his hearings. Lieberman will grill the secretary but won’t call for Napolitano to resign, and he could reiterate his support for her remaining at the DHS post, Senate aides say.

“To some extent it’s going to be a free-for-all; we are as angry as anybody about this,” said an aide to a senior Senate Democrat. “But apart from saying the wrong thing early on, the breaches aren’t really the fault of Napolitano and DHS, so she’s not going to be the target.”

In the House, the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee had seemed to punt on hearings, opting instead for a Government Accountability Office inquiry, until saying Friday in a letter to committee members that he did “plan to hold oversight hearings.”

And while Democrats are figuring out how to look tough while protecting a top official in the hot seat, the House Homeland Security Committee is getting frustrated.

Should the secretary appear — Napolitano is scheduled to return from a trip abroad a day before the scheduled Jan. 27 hearing — she will face questions from both Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and the fiery top Republican, Rep. Peter King of New York.

Thompson said he “won’t give her an unequivocal endorsement because there have been missteps,” but he isn’t calling for her resignation.

Thompson says he is frustrated with the Obama White House and Napolitano for what he considers subpar communication with the House committee. Since the incident two weeks ago, Thompson said he has not spoken with National Security Adviser Jim Jones or top presidential adviser John Brennan. Thompson, however, has spoken to Napolitano at least twice since the incident, he said.

On Friday afternoon, Thompson was preparing a letter to President Barack Obama outlining concerns he has with how the White House handled the Christmas Day plot.

“There is real concern on the committee that the communication between Napolitano and the House Homeland Security Committee is not where it should be,” Thompson told POLITICO Friday morning. “The secretary is not as communicative with members of Congress as she needs to be.”

Thompson’s comments show the fine line Democrats are walking on the terrorism investigation. They want to look tough and demand responsibility from the White House, but they don’t want to do any serious political damage.

“I don’t think you’re going to see Democrats march in lock step with the [Obama] administration on this,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide. “We’re not going to walk the plank for the White House in these hearings.”

No matter what happens in these hearings, however, Republicans are ready to pounce, and they want Napolitano to personally answer their questions. A handful of Republicans have called on the secretary to resign.

“Janet Napolitano, start with that,” King said when asked what he wants in the late-January hearings.

Napolitano was heavily criticized for claiming “the system worked” in the immediate aftermath of the failed bomb attack, but she later backtracked from that comment. Democratic aides believe Napolitano “has gotten through the worst of it” and is not in danger of being forced out or resigning, but they also realize that she may get battered a bit in these oversight hearings.

And even though Obama has used the “buck stops with me” line regarding the terrorism plot, his public statements have constantly reminded people that agencies blew it. Obama has also publicly acknowledged the “failure” by the Homeland Security Department and U.S. intelligence agencies in pre-empting the botched attack, and he said he was personally responsible to the American people for their security.

The president’s steps were intended to reduce some of the angst among Capitol Hill Democrats, yet there is still apprehension about how far Republicans will go in seeking to capitalize on the incident.

By the end of January, the terror investigation will have involved at least seven congressional panels, including the House and Senate Intelligence committees, the House and Senate Homeland Security committees, the Senate Commerce Committee and the House Armed Services Committee. Many of these committees will also brief members privately on classified matters.

Republicans also say they won’t be satisfied just to hear from Napolitano. King is also looking to press Democrats into calling CIA Director Leon Panetta and Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair to testify.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is perhaps the embodiment of the political problem that Democrats face in dealing with the botched terror attack.

Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) had seemed to opt out of holding his own hearing on Flight 253 — as Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member on the panel, had demanded — and instead ordered the GAO to investigate the incident.

Republicans responded to Towns’s blocking tactic by issuing a detailed spreadsheet of every time the committee investigated terrorism when the GOP held power in Congress. Republicans have accused Towns of being “derelict” in his duties.

Towns sees pure politics in the GOP push to hold hearings.

"Their primary demand seems to be that the committee hold 'immediate hearings' that require testimony from 'every government agency,'" Towns said in a letter sent to committee members on Friday. "I do not understand the purpose of holding hearings prior to conducting any investigation, except to provide a platform for uninformed grandstanding that occupies the time of officials who are busy keeping our nation safe."

Towns said Friday that he was “reviewing this matter and plan to hold oversight hearings.”


Sources: Politico

Giuliani Recalls 9-11 Attacks; Says Obama's Response Too Slow

Giuliani: Obama Needs Major Correction On Terror Response

Echoing other high profile conservatives in the wake of the attempted Christmas Day terrorism attack, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told CNN Wednesday President Obama waited far too long to react to the botched bombing and needs to make a "major correction" in the way he is dealing with terrorism.

Speaking on CNN's Larry King Live, Giuliani said the time it took the president to react to the attempted attack may "convince our enemies we are not ready."

President Obama first addressed the issue from his vacation spot in Hawaii three days after the attempted attack, calling for a complete review of the incident and the country's airline security policies. He then gave a public assessment of those reviews in a statement Tuesday, saying they had uncovered that "U.S. intelligence had uncovered numerous "red flags" prior to the attack."

"All this is ten days too late," Giuliani said. "This something you react to immediately. Not after your vacation. The president of the United States, when there is a potential massive attack on the country, should have been on top of it immediately."

Giuliani, who late last month announced he would not run for either governor or senator in New York this year, also faulted the administration for not classifying the bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, as an enemy combatant.

"The minute you [don't designate him an enemy combatant], you cut off the ability to question him," Giuliani said. "I don't know the inside story. He was talking until he went out and got him a lawyer. You want to talk to this guy for a month. You want to keep him for a month or two get to get you a the intelligence he is going give you."

Giuliani's comments closely echo those of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who released a statement saying the president is pretending there is not a war on terrorism.

Speaking to Larry King, Giuliani defended Cheney's criticisms, though said he disagreed with some of them.

"Nobody was concerned about that when everybody criticized President Bush day in and day out including testimonies calling him names when he was trying to prosecute the war in Iraq, and Vice President Cheney is entitled to his view."



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Sources: CNN, TPM, Youtube, Google Maps

Umar Mutallab Pleads Not Guilty In Regular Criminal Court

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Not Guilty Plea For Nigerian Bomb Suspect



A not guilty plea was entered on behalf of a 23-year-old Nigerian man on Friday on charges he tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was arraigned on six charges during a brief federal court appearance. The most severe carries a punishment of up to life in prison — the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

Abdulmutallab walked into the courtroom wearing a white T-shirt, khaki pants and tennis shoes.

When the judge asked him if he understood the charges against him, the soft-spoken suspect answered "yes" in English.

After that, his lawyer said Abdulmutallab would stand mute to the charges, which allows the court to enter a not guilty plea in his defense.

The government said Abdulmutallab tried to blow up an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight by igniting an explosive under his clothes.

President Barack Obama in remarks on Thursday took ultimate responsibility for security failures that led to the botched bombing and ordered reforms aimed at thwarting future attacks.

Linked to a Yemen-based branch of al-Qaida, Abdulmutallab has been held in a federal prison in Milan, Mich.






Brief Hearing

The initial hearing took three minutes, setting the stage for a trial that legal experts said is weighted heavily in the government's favor given the evidence, including Adbulmutallab's injuries.

"It happened in an enclosed environment, in the air, with many witnesses," said Larry Dubin, a law professor at the University of Detroit Mercy. "Usually prosecutors are not as fortunate having those facts when bringing a case."

Officials closed off the snow-covered street approaching the federal building and limited the number of observers in court to fewer than 80 witnesses and reporters.

A Nigerian-American group and a coalition of Muslim Americans announced plans to rally nearby in support of the U.S. government's position.

"Everybody here is concerned about these unfortunate acts and these unfortunate events because they send the wrong message," said Nasser Muhsin, a member of the American Muslim Society in Dearborn, Michigan.

"They put the wrong definition of Islam in people's minds, and that's what we are concerned about," said Muhsin.



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Sources: MSNBC, CNN, Google Maps

Does Janet Napolitano Deserve Another Chance?

Don't Under Estimate Janet Napolitano



Most Americans got their first prolonged look at Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, on Sunday, Dec. 27. After a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam ignited a concealed fuse as the plane approached Detroit for a landing, apparently intending to blow it up and kill all aboard, it fell to Napolitano to take charge of the federal response.

"No drama" demeanor

It came as no surprise to anyone who knows her that Napolitano handled the incident and its aftermath with aplomb. In the years I have known her, she has managed every challenge that has come her way with the same calm command that she showed in this instance. If there is anyone in the administration who embodies President Obama's preference for quiet competence with ``no drama,'' it's Napolitano.

I watched as she made the rounds of the morning interview programs that Sunday, laying out what she knew about the would-be terrorist and carefully refusing to speculate about the many matters that were still being investigated. She is being criticized for saying ``the system worked,'' but her part of the response system did work.

It must have been a frantic time for her. She was in San Francisco, far from her Washington office, and she must have had a sleepless night. But her eyes were bright and her voice was calm. Everything appeared to be completely normal, except that her usual sense of humor was absent, as it should have been, given the circumstances.

I flashed back to the first time I met her. A good friend from the staff of the late Rep. Morris K. ``Mo'' Udall had gone to work for Napolitano. On a reporting trip to Arizona, I called the staffer and she suggested meeting Napolitano for lunch in Phoenix.

Napolitano was involved in a primary race for governor, and she picked a neighborhood Mexican restaurant where the warmth of the greeting she received made it clear she had been there many times. We talked about her campaign and, more generally, about Western state politics.

It was evident from that first conversation that Napolitano had a firm view of herself and the course she had staked out. Her primary opponent was running to her left, but Napolitano understood that her credentials as a law-and-order former U.S. attorney for Arizona, appointed by President Clinton, were more important to her chances of winning the governorship of Barry Goldwater's and John McCain's home state than any checklist of liberal positions.

Her instinct was to run down the center, and she was confident enough of her positions so that she did not agonize over them. What struck me most forcibly at that first meeting was her lack of guardedness. We quickly found ourselves talking as if we had known each other for years, and her comments were as candid as they were shrewd.

She soon became one of my favorite pols in either party. I saw her mainly at the semi-annual meetings of the National Governors Association, where she won a warm welcome on both sides, and occasionally on reporting trips to Arizona.

In 2008, ensconced in her second term as governor, her endorsement was sought by all the Democrats running for president. Bill and Hillary Clinton had powerful supporters in Arizona, especially in the Latino community. But I knew from our conversations that Napolitano had substantial doubts whether the senator from New York, with her conventionally liberal positions, could defeat McCain -- whose independence Napolitano always respected.

Deepening trust

Napolitano had been much slower than Obama was in coming to doubt the war in Iraq, but it really was no surprise when she gave an early endorsement to the young senator from Illinois. His trust in her was deepened when she took on the assignment of drafting the platform for passage at the Democratic National Convention -- a potentially tricky chore that she pulled off without a bobble.

The Obama Cabinet is filled with talents, but many of the stars are of an age or temperament unlikely to turn them into successor candidates. Napolitano will face many substantive tests -- not just in dealing with terrorism but in playing an important role in immigration reform -- before she is a candidate for anything. But her potential is almost unlimited.


Sources: Miami Herald, Politico, Youtube

Obama's Security Review Speech Highlights System Failures; White House Report

Link To White House National Security Review Report Documents

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Obama Points To Failures In Intelligence System


President Obama said Thursday that America's first line of defense is "timely, accurate" intelligence that is properly integrated.

"That's not what happened" before the attempted December 25 airplane bombing, he said.

Obama pointed out three failures in the nation's intelligence system that allowed a would-be bomber to board a U.S.-bound plane:

The intelligence community didn't aggressively follow up on information that it had that al Qaeda sought to strike the U.S.; there was a failure to "connect the dots" in the information; and shortcomings in the in the terror watch list system that didn't place him a no-fly list.

There was "a failure to connect and understand the intelligence that we already had," Obama said.

The President said he had ordered four reforms:

First), he ordered the intelligence community to assign responsiblity to individuals to pursue leads on specific high-priority threats.

Second), intelligence reports will be distributed more widely and quickly.

Third), Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair will overhaul existing intelligence analytical efforts.

Fourth), the government will strengthen the criteria used to add people to no-fly list.

Obama also said he was directing the Homeland Security Department to improve international partnerships to boost screening at airports around the world. The Department of Energy will work to develop better screening technology, he said.

Obama said he was establishing accountability reviews for agencies. His national security adviser, John Brennan, will report to him every 30 days on the reviews, he said.

There is "no silver bullet" to securing all flights coming into America every day, Obama warned.

He spoke of his "solemn responsibility" to keep the nation secure. "Ultimately, the buck stops with me."

But Obama is not planning to fire anyone for the foul-up, a senior administration official said.

The official said the president believes that previous administrations would "play hide the ball" and not come clean with the American people when things go wrong, so he wants to be direct about what needs to be fixed, but the official said the president does not want this process to devolve into finger-pointing.

Pressed on whether people in the administration are likely to be fired to follow through on Obama's promise last week to bring "accountability" to all levels of government, the senior administration official said no.

"It's about holding accountable a system so that it works," said the senior official.

Another U.S. official briefed on the investigation said federal agents flagged the name of the suspect in the botched Christmas Day terrorist attack while his plane was headed from the Netherlands to the United States and were planning to question him at the Detroit airport.

The source said agents with Customs and Border Protection officials "analyzed the database" as is their practice when the plane was in the air and were ready "to meet" and interview Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab when his plane arrived.

Also, an Obama administration official said Customs and Border Protection followed its normal procedures as it prepared for arriving passengers, and by doing so, it accessed the suspect's record in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database.

The White House is pushing back on an Los Angeles Times report published Wednesday saying U.S. border security officials became aware of the suspect's alleged extremist ties while he was en route.

"As we have indicated before, there were bits and pieces of information about AbdulMutallab available in a variety of areas in the system prior to December 25. There was no new information that emerged when the plane was in the air," an administration official said.

Today the White House plans to release an unclassified report by John Brennan, the assistant to the president on homeland security and Counter Terrorism, detailing what went wrong and also to reveal new steps intended to thwart future attacks.

Since the attempted attack, the intelligence community has scrubbed the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, which has more than 500,000 suspects, adding people to U.S. watch lists and no-fly lists as a result.

Officials would not have pulled AbdulMutallab aside for a secondary screening or prevented him from flying in Amsterdam because he was not on the no-fly or terror watch lists, the administration source said.

Obama has demanded to know why the suspect was allowed on the plane, given the information available.

"This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous," Obama told his national security team Tuesday, according to a senior administration official. "We dodged a bullet, but just barely."

According to authorities, AbdulMutallab tried to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear as a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam made its final approach to Detroit. The device failed to fully detonate, instead setting off a fire at the man's seat.

Obama said he wants immediate reforms to correct what he called systemic failures that allowed the attack to happen.

Americans will feel "a certain shock" after reading Thursday's report on the missed warning signs, White House National Security Adviser James Jones told USA Today.

"We know what happened, we know what didn't happen, and we know how to fix it," Jones said. "That should be an encouraging aspect. We don't have to reinvent anything to make sure it doesn't happen again."

John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence, said it's always easier to piece things together in retrospect.

"There's always a lot of noise in the system, and then you've got to sort out from that noise the signals that are really important. And sometimes, we fail to do that," he said on CNN's "American Morning."

"My suspicion in this case is that there wasn't necessarily that much information and that there was quite a bit of ambiguity in whatever was available. In retrospect, it probably looks like we should have been able to figure out what happened," he said.

Negroponte said that what interests him is whether the attempted attack is a part of a larger plot.

"I think the important thing right now is that we get as much information from his as we can," he said.

AbdulMutallab is scheduled to make his first court appearance Friday.

On Wednesday, a Federal Grand Jury indicted him on charges of:

Attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction; attempted murder within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States;

Willful attempt to destroy and wreck an aircraft within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States;

Willfully placing a destructive device in, upon and in proximity to an aircraft within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States;

and Two counts of possession of a firearm/destructive in furtherance of a crime of violence.

Mostly Republican critics have said AbdulMutallab should have been subjected to military interrogation rather than receiving the rights of a defendant in the U.S. criminal justice system.



Sources: CNN, MSNBC

Obama's "Cool" Response To Flight 253 Bomb Threat May Cost Democrats

In order for Pres. Obama and the Democrats to survive this recent Terror crisis some heads or at least one head must roll.

Obama's "the buck stops here" rhetoric is no longer enough to appease Voters.

We don't care about his cool, "Don Ho" Hawaiian upbringing.

He's now President of the United States for God's Sake and needs to show some passion!

Americans don't feel safe and our confidence in his administration is waning fast!

This is NOT the "CHANGE" most of us cast our ballots for in November 2008.

When is Pres. Obama going to cease talking (because talk is cheap) and start acting like a Bold LEADER?

Its high time for the Obama Admin. staff to stop celebrating his victory and get to work!

Voters want Jobs and National Security!

Which is why although I'm a Moderate Democrat, I totally agree with the contents of Nicolle Wallace's article listed below, published on The Daily Beast's website.









What If the Bomb On Flight 253 Had Gone Off?


Had the Christmas bomber succeeded, America would be having a very different security debate now. Nicolle Wallace on Obama’s sleepy response to a near-disaster—and the political price he may pay.

What if the "panty-bomber" had been less incompetent?

What if the Christmas Day travelers on Northwest Flight 253 had been snoozing or were sucked into a good movie and hadn’t noticed the strange behavior of fellow passenger Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab? What if, heaven forbid, that plane had blown up in the skies over the Atlantic Ocean or above Michigan? What kind of national debate would we be having?

We would be a nation in mourning. We would pick up our morning papers and read, tearfully, the tragic stories of lives cut short by the murderous determination of another jihadist. We would remain glued to our television sets where we’d watch the 9/11 families—veterans of grief—take to the airwaves with advice for the victims’ loved ones about coping with the unthinkable.

Our political leaders would call for calm and seek to reassure Americans that it is safe to fly. Our president would have declared that the terrorist network that trained and aided Abdulmutallab would pay the ultimate price for its crimes against innocent men, women and children.

Without a doubt, the debate about what went wrong and who is to blame for the “systemic failures” that allowed a known associate of terrorists in Yemen to board a plane bound for the U.S. without checked luggage would have taken place. But the conversation would likely be less political. The tragedy would have kept the focus on the urgent need to fix—once and for all—the flow of information among intelligence gatherers and security implementers.

Because no matter what you think of President Obama, he is committed to protecting Americans from terrorists who wish to do us harm, and any suggestion to the contrary is ridiculous. We will have rigorous disagreements about the strategies and tactics. And Obama has done himself irreparable harm with the right wing by admonishing America's alleged "sins" in his travels overseas and seeming to display more enthusiasm for protecting the legal rights of terrorists and detainees at Guantanamo than winning—or even referring to—the war against terror.

But that does not erase the simple fact that one does not take the oath of office without assuming responsibility for the safety of each and every American citizen. One does not walk the solemn halls of the West Wing, or salute the men and women of the military, or console the families of the fallen without feeling the burden of the office he holds.

Which is why it’s so strange that he and his savvy team took so long to display the conviction finally displayed in his remarks on Tuesday. Surely, during the hours following the attempted attack, someone must have said, “Mr. President, we barely escaped disaster—we need to take this as seriously as we would if the attacker had been successful.” Surely, some of his senior aides disagreed with the decision to allow the president to play half a dozen more rounds of golf and take in Avatar with the kids before returning to Washington to ride herd on the bureaucracies responsible for the breakdown.

Surely, some among his aides must have had a bad feeling that they were drifting toward disaster and that the “right” thing to do was to come back to Washington, put on a suit, and assume the role of a commander in chief in charge of the situation. Surely, some among his aides realized that the prudent path is the unpleasant path: cutting a vacation short, publicly admonishing a political ally in the Cabinet, pulling the rug out from under the individuals who granted Abdulmutallab a visa, showing anger in public despite all his tendencies to never let us see him sweat.

This is the team that studied the failures of the Bush and Clinton years and crafted an image based squarely in being everything they were not. So it is inexplicable that the president they emulated during Obama's first terror test was George W. Bush—and not the George W. Bush that rallied the nation when he stood atop the rubble at ground zero and announced to the terrorists that they would soon be hearing from America. Obama emulated the George W. Bush he heaped scorn upon during the campaign for what Democrats branded a slow and inept response to Hurricane Katrina by the Bush team.

It's not like the criticisms are inaudible from inside the bubble during a crisis; the problem is that responding to them is akin to one of those dreams where you try to run but your legs won't move. In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, and even after an impressive federal response to subsequent hurricanes in 2005, the Bush administration couldn't escape the impression that took hold in the crucial early days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

Where does Obama go from here? That depends in part on his appetite for pain.

Will he hold a Cabinet secretary like Janet Napolitano or Hillary Clinton accountable for the actions of people in their agencies? Or will he simply seek to absorb all the responsibility by saying “the buck stops here?” And how will the public respond? Will this feel like the “change” he promised—or business as usual in Washington?

By far the most interesting dynamic that Obama put into motion on Christmas Day will be impossible to measure for certain until Election Day 2010. What if those independent voters who were already parting ways with Obama over health care and runaway government spending decide that his slow response to a near-tragic terror attack is the last straw?



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Sources: The Daily Beast, CNN, Huffington Post, Politico, Google Maps

Umar Mutallab Was Trained In Yemen, Recruited In London

Yemeni Official: U.S. Terror Suspect Recruited In Britain

A terror suspect in the attempted bombing of a U.S. jetliner was radicalized in Britain, but did meet with a radical Muslim Cleric in Yemen, a top government official said Thursday.

The meeting between Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab and cleric Anwar al-Awlaki took place in Shabwa, about 290 kilometers (180 miles) southeast of the capital, Sanaa, according to Yemen's Deputy Prime Minister for Defense and Security Rashad Al-Alemi.

No other details about the encounter were immediately available.

U.S. intelligence officials have been evaluating whether al-Awlaki played a role in the botched attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet en route from Amsterdam, Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan on Christmas Day.

The attempt to ignite explosives hidden in AbdulMutallab's underwear failed to bring down the plane.

A federal grand jury indicted AbdulMutallab Wednesday on six counts, including an attempt to murder the other 289 people aboard.

If convicted, the 23-year-old Nigerian national faces a sentence of life in prison.

Al-Alemi emphasized at Thursday's news conference that AbdulMutallab lived in Yemen, but did not pick up his radical views there, instead saying that happen when he resided in Britain between 2005 and 2008.

"This Nigerian guy came to Yemen in 2004 and 2005 to study Arabic and lived one year in Yemen," Al-Alemi said. "From 2004 to 2005, he didn't have any kind of links to extremism and radicals.

"From 2005 on, he was absorbed by extremists in Britain, that is the reason he was not able to come back to Britain," he continued. "Yemen was not informed by the U.S. or British authorities that there were concerns about him."

Al-Alemi didn't say when the meeting between AbdulMutallab and Al-Awlaki took place.

Asked whether AbdulMutallab was recruited by al Qaeda in London, a Metropolitan police official in Britain replied "no comment."

British Home Secretary Alan Johnson said Tuesday the British government had no evidence that AbdulMutallab had been planning an attack, and believes he was "radicalized" after he left Britain.

British security services investigated AbdulMutallab's communications with UK-based individuals they had under observation while he was living in London, but judged that he did not then pose a danger. Those individuals were among 2,000 terror suspects British security agencies currently keep watch over, according to a senior British counter-terrorism source.

Al-Awlaki's name also surfaced in November when U.S. officials revealed he and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan -- the U.S. Army psychiatrist accused of fatally shooting 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5 -- had exchanged e-mails. The intercepted e-mails between the two, officials said, had not set off alarm bells.

The cleric recently told Al Jazeera's Arabic-language Web site that he had been in touch with Hasan in recent years. In that interview, al-Awlaki said he met Hasan nine years ago while serving as an imam at a mosque in the Washington area.

The cleric said Hasan communicated with him via e-mail starting about a year before the shooting rampage -- seeking advice about killing U.S. troops, the cleric said.

The 9/11 Commission Report says al-Awlaki had contact with two of the 9/11 hijackers while they were in the United States, though there is no evidence he knew of the plot.

Al-Awlaki is believed to have fled to Yemen in 2003 or 2004. Since then, he has been referred to as a "rock star" by some of those who incite radicalism on the Internet.

His current whereabouts are unknown to U.S. officials. Some have speculated that he was killed in a recent strike on suspected jihadist hideouts in Yemen.

But a U.S. official said the intelligence community believes al-Awlaki is alive. His own family was quoted last week as having said the same thing.

He may have been among al Qaeda operatives targeted in a December 24 airstrike in Yemen that killed some 30 militants, the Yemen news agency SABA reported at the time of the attack.



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Sources: CNN, TIME, Google Maps

Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab Indicted On Six Criminal Charges

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Nigerian Man Indicted In Plot To Blow Up Plane


A grand jury on Wednesday indicted a 23-year-old Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day.

The six charges against Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab include attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted murder.

Authorities say Abdulmutallab was traveling to Detroit from Amsterdam when he tried to ignite an explosive aboard the airliner. Passengers pounced on him and prevented disaster.

He was being held at a federal prison in Milan, Mich.



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Sources: AP, MSNBC, Google Maps

Obama Admin. To Release Flight 253 Terror Attack Report Thursday

Obama to Release Report on Terror Attempt Thursday


White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday afternoon that the unclassified version of a "comprehensive" preliminary White House review of the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day will be released Thursday.

According to Gibbs, President Obama will make remarks in conjunction with the release of the review. He expected the release and comments in the early afternoon.

Officials are engaged in separate reviews of passenger screening procedures and the use of terror watch lists. The review to be released tomorrow largely relates to the watch lists, and was prepared by counterterrorism and homeland security adviser John Brennan.

Both Brennan and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will likely discuss their review at the White House tomorrow, Gibbs said. Napolitano's review has focused largely on detection capabilities and screening.

Following a meeting with top officials Tuesday, the president said that the reviews continue to "reveal more about the human and systemic failures that almost cost nearly 300 lives."

Officials have already updated government watch lists in the wake of the attack. The president says the system "is not broken" but lamented in comments Tuesday that 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged bomber, was able to board the airplane despite numerous red flags being raised about him.

He said intelligence agencies knew enough to disrupt the terror attempt but failed to connect the dots to do so.

Gibbs said Wednesday that Mr. Obama will continue to examine and evaluate the security situation in the coming months.


Sources: CBS News

Obama Chastises His Security Team: "We Had A Failure To Communicate"

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Obama: Airline Attack Was Preventable


President Barack Obama asserted on Tuesday that the U.S. government had enough information to foil the attempted bombing on a Christmas Day airline flight but intelligence agencies "failed to connect the dots."

Obama called that unacceptable and said, "I will not tolerate it."

The accused attacker, 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has claimed ties to al-Qaida. Witnesses said he ignited an explosive mixture but it failed to do serious damage to the Northwest jetliner or its passengers, and he was subdued by other passengers and airline crew members on the Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight.

The president, speaking after meeting with his Cabinet and national security team, declared, "We have to do better and we will do better. And we will do it quickly."

But while he expressed clear displeasure with the U.S. failure to prevent the suspect from boarding a U.S.-bound flight, Obama did not announce any firings or job reassignments.

Obama also said he was suspending the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to Yemen. The Christmas attack has raised concerns about Yemen, because the Nigerian man has claimed to have been acting on instructions from al-Qaida operatives in that country.

Nearly half of the 198 terror suspect detainees held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are from Yemen. But Obama reiterated his vow to eventually close the camp.

"Make no mistake, we will close Guantanamo prison," Obama said. The camp, he said, "was an explicit rationale for the formation of al-Qaida" operating in Yemen.

As for the Christmas attack, Obama said it exposed "a potentially disastrous" security failure.

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Red Flags

He spoke after a White House meeting with the officials charged with carrying out two reviews he has ordered. Obama spelled out recent changes in security protocols for airline flights and changes to the government's watchlist of suspected terrorists.

At the meeting in the Situation Room, the president told participants, according to the White House: "This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous. We dodged a bullet but just barely."

There was no finger-pointing at the meeting and the leaders of each agency and department took responsibility for failures at their respective organizations, officials said.

Obama told reporters the security lapse didn't have to do with the collection of information but with the failure to integrate and analyze what was there. The bottom line, he said was that the government had "sufficient information to uncover this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack."

"Our intelligence community failed to connect those dots which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list," he said. "This was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already have."

Obama said that it was clear the government knew that the suspect, Abdulmutallab, had traveled to Yemen and joined with extremists there.

"It now turns out that our intelligence community knew of other red flags that al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike not only American targets in Yemen, but the United States itself. And we had information that this group was working with an individual ... who we now know was in fact the individual involved in the Christmas attack," he said.

New Security Procedures

Some of the tougher procedures Obama demanded have already been put in place.

The Transportation Security Administration directed airlines, beginning Monday, to give full-body, pat-down searches to U.S.-bound travelers from Yemen, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and 11 other countries.

Before Obama's comments, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president still has full confidence in his three top national security officials: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

They were among the 20 high-level officials who sat down with Obama in the White House for a meeting that lasted over 90 minutes.

Since the attempted attack, the government has added dozens of names to its lists of suspected terrorists and those barred from flights bound for the United States.

The additions came after U.S. officials scrutinized a larger database of suspected terrorists, an intelligence official said Monday.

People on the watch list are subject to additional scrutiny before they are allowed to enter this country, while anyone on the no-fly list is barred from boarding aircraft in or headed for the United States.

Abdulmutallab remained in federal custody, charged with trying to destroy the Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit. He is alleged to have smuggled an explosive device onboard and set if off. The device sparked only a fire and not the intended explosion.


Sources: MSNBC

Newt Echoes Cheney: "Americans Are Less Safe"

Newt Gingrich: "We Are Not Safe"


Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday night that Americans are less “safe” than they were a year ago.

During an interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, the former Republican congressman from Georgia blamed a federal bureaucracy that is “so lacking in focus” that even though the father of the accused Christmas Day bomber warned a U.S. embassy about his son, “we couldn’t find a way to stop him.”

“We are not safe. We are in much greater danger than we were a year ago,” Gingrich said, though adding that “it’s not just Bush vs. Obama.”

“The North Koreans had an additional year to build missiles,” he said. “Iranians had an additional year to develop their nuclear weapons and keep paying for terrorists. Al Qaeda had an additional year. And by the way, two of the top four people in Al Qaeda in Yemen were released from Guantanamo Bay.”

Gingrich also accused the administration of “very quietly” signing an executive order that removes “all American constraints” from the international police force Interpol.

“Freedom of information acts don't apply,” he said. “All the constraints that you as a citizen could use against an American police force, based on a recent Obama-signed executive order, give Interpol — which has relationships with Syria, Libya, with Iran — it gives them all sorts of extra legality in the United States in a way that has never, ever before been offered to Interpol.”

Gingrich said that the Obama administration would provide more leeway to an International force because Attorney General Eric Holder is most concerned with "Protecting the Rights of Terrorists".

“He lives in a world where somehow the United States is dangerous and the United States government is dangerous,” Gingrich said of Holder.

In his December executive order, Obama expanded on Executive Order 12425 — signed by President Ronald Reagan — granting Interpol the same exemptions provided to numerous groups under the International Organizations Immunities Act. Reagan’s order did not include provisions to block the search and seizure of property and records of Interpol employees — as the act provides for other groups — nor grant the organization exemptions on federal taxes, property


Sources: Politico