And last night on the show, Marc Theissen, former Bush and Rummy speechwriter, whose new book, “Courting Disaster,” has become the go to book to get the inside account of what really happened in interrogations at Gitmo, said blood would be on the hands of Eric Holder–and Barack Obama–if there’s another attack. Under this new policy the US has gone from treating radical Islamic terrorists as combatants to treating them like some perp who tried to knock over a 7/11.

Theissen (www.courtingdisaster.com) says this change in policy foreclosed the possibility of getting as much intel out Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as we might have. FBI officers questioned him for only 50 minutes. The DNI, CIA WERE NOT CALLED! Here’s a guy with fresh intel from a newly constituted band of bad actors in Yemen, with new leadership, new operational organization and we just let him lawyer up. As Theissen noted on the show, Al Qaeda expected this guy to have been vaporized in the attack, but we have him ALIVE and we don’t spend time plumbing the depths of his knowledge about a new group we didn’t know about successfully sending suicide bomber[s] to our shores? That’s not just dumb, that is spectacularly dangerous!
Ironically, in a piece co authored with frequent Victoria Taft Show guest, David Rivkin, Theissen finds that the Obama administration has gone to court to uphold enhanced interrogations. So what gives? Here’s a link to the piece in today’s Wall Street Journal.  And here’s the nut ‘graf illustrating the untenable position the new Obama administration posture on enemy combatant civilian trials has wrought,

On Dec. 18, 2009, days before the Christmas attack, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, made a secret filing in federal district court that was aimed at saving the prosecution of Ahmed Ghailani, another al Qaeda terrorist. Ghailani is facing charges for helping al Qaeda bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Ghailani argues that those charges should be dropped because lengthy CIA interrogations have denied him his constitutional right to a speedy trial.

Now the Weekly Standard has delved into the Christmas bombing interrogation story and found that a willing press is allowing the administration to change the story line etc THREE TIMES.
Stephen Hayes writes (Here) says the first account of the questioning from the AP morphed over time. In a material and dramatic difference between the original Obama Administration story, the Washington Post later claim Abdulmutallab clammed up before he was mirandized,

In a story published last Friday, the Washington Post attempted the first rewrite, claiming that new details suggest “that Abdulmutallab, 23, clammed up even before he was informed of his right to remain silent — a warning that could have come later had he been placed in military custody.”

Then Hayes notes,

That’s a key difference.  In the AP account, a clean team is sent in to Mirandize Abdulmutallab.  In the Post account, Abdulmutallab asks for a lawyer on his own and “FBI agents then read him his rights.”

The LA Times obligingly picked up the new story  as Hayes notes in his piece,

And in the LA Times piece, like the Post piece, the chronology has changed.  According to the Times: “The source said that Abdulmutallab was not read his rights until he made it clear that he was not going to say anything else.”

Hayes throws his lot in with the original story by the AP,

 Hayes says he hopes that maybe we’ll get some answers today when Panetta et. al., are questioned on capitol hill. Of course, Panetta’s CIA spooks weren’t called in till it was too late.
Tom Joscelyn, writing in the Weekly Standard (Here) wanted Abdulmutallab’s questioners to ask about this little tidbit,

as many as 36 American ex-convicts arrived in Yemen in the past year, ostensibly to study Arabic. The officials said there are legitimate reasons for Americans and others to study and live in Yemen, but they said some of the Americans had disappeared and are suspected of having gone to Al Qaeda training camps in ungoverned portions of the impoverished country. 

Emphasis is all Tom’s.
It would have been nice to know if the Eunich Bomber knew anything about this. Woulda, coulda, shoulda… Yep, that sounds like the Obama “strategy” in the war on terror alright.