Brainstorming with Joy Behar...



(via Daily Caller and Real Clear Politics)

Unconfirmed.

Update: The New York Times is confirming that Osama Bin Laden is dead.

It's being reported that he was killed last week in a missile attack. The US had to wait for DNA confirmation before the announcement. Here's the Fox News report.

Update II: Unconfirmed reports that snipers, not a missile strike, got him. Shot in the head.

Update III: President Obama just spoke to the nation and said that Bin Laden was killed today in Pakistan.

No virgins for you...

CNN: (via RCP) (emphasis added)

A suicide bomber wearing a vest laden with explosives was killed by locals Thursday in eastern Afghanistan before he was able to detonate, police said.
...

The people who intervened in the incident pelted the man with stones and slashed him with knives and were able to kill the man and give the suicide vest to police.

Richard Cohen:

There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America's critics but the message sent to Americans themselves. When, oh when, will this administration wake up?

Read the whole piece.

Shocker.



Here is the cartoon:

What to make of this?

From AP:

A passenger onboard the same Northwest Airlines flight that was attacked on Christmas Day was taken into custody in Detroit on Sunday after becoming verbally disruptive upon landing, officials said.

A law enforcement official said the man was Nigerian and had locked himself in the airliner's bathroom. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

Update: ABC News' Richard Esposito and Michael S. James report:

According to initial information, there were as many as four subjects aboard and under investigation, law enforcement sources told ABC News. The investigation was centered on a principal suspect who barricaded himself in bathroom and three others possibly viewed as spotters.

The main subject of the investigation apparently spent a considerable amount of time in the restroom, the law enforcement sources said. When the subject exited restroom, airline personnel searched it with negative results.


FBI officials from the Detroit office were on the scene but did not initially board the aircraft. They had information that the man in the bathroom could be Nigerian and that the crew broke down the bathroom door and placed him into custody.
...

Two passengers who were aboard today's flight downplayed the latest incident. One told ABC News that the flight landed and passengers were held on the plane for 15 minutes until customs agents arrived. Both said they did not see anyone arrested.

ABC News' Richard Esposito and Brian Ross: (emphasis added)

Officials now say tragedy was only averted on Northwest flight 253 because a makeshift detonator failed to work properly.

Bomb experts say there was more than enough explosive to bring down the Northwest jet, which had nearly 300 people aboard, had the detonator not failed, and the nation's outdated airport screening machines may need to be upgraded.
...

According to investigators, the bomb used yesterday was built in Yemen by a top al Qaeda bomb maker.
...

[Umar Farouk Abdul] Abdulmutallab was on a terrorism watch list, but not on a no-fly list. Said Clarke, "So once again, we have the U.S. government, as in the case of the Fort Hood attacks, knowing about someone, knowing that they were suspicious, but that information didn't get to the right people in time."

Brutally Honest introduces Jasper Schuringa.

According to early reports (this doesn't mean they're accurate of course), it appears that a Nigerian national who studied in England (Times of London) flew from Nigeria to Amsterdam and then on to Detroit, where, on the landing descent, he tried to inject with a syringe a liquid into some dry material he had taped to his leg (ABC News).

According to passengers, this made popping noises and started a fire, at which point a Dutch man in his 20s or 30s -- described as "sturdy" -- subdued the suspect, and led him in a headlock to the front of the plane, where he was detained until he was arrested.

The resulting fire had to be put out with fire extinguishers, according to passengers.

The White House is calling it "an attempted act of terrorism."

What follows are different reports of the event...

From AP:

A Northwest Airlines passenger landing in Detroit on Friday tried to blow up the flight but the explosive device failed, two U.S. national security officials said.

The passenger, who was traveling on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam, was not identified. He was being questioned Friday evening, according to one of the officials, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.

The motive of the Christmas Day attack was not immediately clear.
...

Authorities initially believed the passenger had set off firecrackers that caused some minor injuries.

More info at Hot Air and at Malkin.

Update: AP sources: Al-Qaida link in failed plane attack:

U.S. officials say a Northwest Airlines passenger from Nigeria said he was acting on behalf of al-Qaida when he tried to blow up a flight Friday as it landed in Detroit.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., identified the suspect as Abdul Mudallad, a Nigerian. King said the flight began in Nigeria and went through Amsterdam en route to Detroit.

One of the U.S. intelligence officials said the explosive device was a mix of powder and liquid. It failed when the passenger tried to detonate it.

Update II: Fox News reports that White House calls it "an attempted act of terror."

Update III: MSNBC's report here.

Update IV: Here's a Washington Post report.

Update V: Here's another report from the Detroit Free Press.

Update VI: Wall Street Journal: Midair Bomb Attempt Fails

Update VII: Here's a report from the New York Times.

Update VIII: The Times of London reports:

The suspect was "reported to be studying in Britain..."

Update IX: ABC News reports:

The suspect told authorities that he had explosive powder taped to his leg and used a syringe of chemicals to mix with the powder that was to cause explosion. This is of [concern] because it is a method of mixing that is consistent with terror techniques.

Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law and Chairman of the Center for the Rule of Law Ronald Cass:

Most public attention now will focus on whether Mr. Holder made the right choice [to hold Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial in New York federal court for the 9/11 attacks]. But that isn't the only question people concerned with how our government works should be asking.

The other question is what if Mr. Holder has guessed wrong? What if challenges to the way evidence was obtained result in exclusion of enough material that KSM is acquitted? What if discovery rules for federal criminal trials again result in disclosure of sensitive information - ending up in the hands of our enemies - on how we gather information and who provides it? What if that facilitates another attack with more lives lost?

Would there then be exposure for Holder and those who advised him? Should the public have access to the memos now so that we can judge for ourselves if the advice was sound? Should we be thinking about possible legal sanctions, maybe even prosecution, if we decide the advice was wrong, that it didn't rightly account for the risks to our safety and our lives, that it didn't value our security highly enough, or didn't ultimately fulfill the legal obligations of those in high office?
...

If history is a guide, however, there will be plenty of bad fallout from this choice. The ill fit between the criminal process and the fight against international terrorism will reverberate in a series of decisions down the road respecting the conflict between effective antiterrorist measures and steps necessary to preserve litigation options. We don't want soldiers thinking about reading enemy combatants their rights, giving them Miranda warnings, making sure they have access to lawyers. We don't want our intelligence community worrying that Brady rules for disclosing evidence will compromise their effectiveness by revealing critical information on their methods and sources.

Read the whole piece.

The Daily Mail's Jason Lewis and Peter Allen report:

A brilliant young nuclear scientist who was arrested in France last week over alleged links to Al Qaeda had worked for a top-secret British nuclear research centre.

Last night fears were growing that Dr Adlene Hicheur ? who was a researcher for the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire for a year ? could have been planning a nuclear attack in the UK.

The French government said yesterday that the arrest of Hicheur, 32, and his brother Dr Halim Hicheur, 25, could have averted a terrorist atrocity.

They were seized after an 18-month investigation by French anti-terrorist police hours before Adlene Hicheur was due to travel to the laboratory where he now works at, CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research near Geneva.

Halim Hicheur carries out research at similar high-security scientific institutions around Europe.
...

The decision to arrest them followed the interception of internet exchanges with people identified as having links to terrorists in Algeria.

The messages reportedly included information on potential targets in France and elsewhere in Europe.

The brothers? British links included Adlene?s work for the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, as well as research at university cities including London, Manchester, Durham, Edinburgh and St Andrews. They had also spent time studying at Ivy League universities in the US.
...

European intelligence sources said that Adlene Hicheur, who studied at Stanford University in California before moving to Oxfordshire, had expressed a ?very strong wish to carry out attacks anywhere where Western security interests can be damaged?.

Ralph Peters:

This president has to make a decision. A real decision. But it looks like he's going to wiggle, squirm and dodge, then go in front of the teleprompter to vote "present" again.

Worsening the muddle, the troop-level debate is being disgracefully politicized on all sides.

Obama's seeking the least politically damaging choice, rather than the most effective military approach. He's less concerned with winning than with avoiding blame.

Shameful, shameful, shameful.

Meanwhile, too many conservatives are doing to Obama what they rightly decried when the left did it to Bush: Dems used Iraq as a club to beat Bush; now Republicans want to wield Afghanistan against Obama. Hey, this is about our national security and the lives of those in uniform -- not scoring cheap political points.

Shameful, shameful, shameful.

... we've shattered al Qaeda and have a chance to destroy it. But we need to recall the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place -- to slay our enemies. That's the only thing that works, and the only thing that matters.

If Obama tries to split the difference in Afghanistan, he'll have made the worst possible choice. And he won't be able to blame Bush anymore.

Read it all.

Chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 Michael Scheuer, on the release of the CIA interrogation memos:

Americans should keep this worst-case scenario [a potential nuclear attack on the US] in mind as they watch the tragicomic spectacle taking place in the wake of the publication of the Justice Department's interrogation memos. It will help them recognize this episode of political theater as another major step in the bipartisan dismantling of America's defenses based on the requirements of presidential ideology. George W. Bush's democracy-spreading philosophy yielded the invasion of Iraq and set the United States at war with much of the Muslim world. Bush's worldview thereby produced an enemy that quickly outpaced the limited but proven threat-containing capacities of the major U.S. counterterrorism programs -- rendition, interrogation and unmanned aerial vehicle attacks.

Now, in a single week, President Obama has eliminated two-thirds of that successful-but-not-sufficient national defense troika because his personal ideology -- a fair gist of which is "If the world likes us more we are more secure" -- cannot tolerate harsh interrogation techniques, torture or coercive interviews, call them what you will. Surprisingly, Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying "War on Terror" and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example.

Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families. The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their "moral compass," a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder's identifying them as "moral cowards." Mulling Obama's claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs?

Before enthroning Obama's personal morality as U.S. defense policy, of course, some dirty work had to be done. Last Sunday, Obama's hit man and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel led the charge by telling the American people that the interrogation techniques are a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and its Islamist partners. Well, no, Mr. Emanuel, that is not at all the case. The techniques surely are not popular with our foes and their supporters -- should that be a concern in any event? -- but they do not even make the Islamists' hit parade of anti-U.S. recruiting tools. That list is headed by Washington's support for Arab tyrannies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, its presence on the Arabian Peninsula and its unqualified support for Israel. Still, Emanuel's statement surely sounded plausible to Americans who have received no education about our Islamist enemy's true motivation from Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton or George H.W. Bush.
...

And so as the Justice Department memos farce plays out over the coming weeks, Americans can be confident that both parties will play politics to the hilt while letting the nation's safety take the hindmost. ... Americans and their country's security will be the losers. The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party's left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America's defense and -- like Obama -- naively believe that the West's Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya.

The Washington Post's David Ignatius:

At the Central Intelligence Agency, it's known as "slow rolling." That's what agency officers sometimes do on politically sensitive assignments. They go through the motions; they pass cables back and forth; they take other jobs out of the danger zone; they cover their backsides.

Sad to say, it's slow roll time at Langley after the release of interrogation memos that, in the words of one veteran officer, "hit the agency like a car bomb in the driveway." President Obama promised CIA officers that they won't be prosecuted for carrying out lawful orders, but the people on the firing line don't believe him. They think the memos have opened a new season of investigation and retribution.

The lesson for younger officers is obvious: Keep your head down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk. Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.

That's just great. Read the whole piece.