Jaw-dropping story in today’s Washington Post:
President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser on Sunday defended the administration’s decision to try in federal court the man charged with attempting to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day and indicated that he would be offered a plea agreement to persuade him to reveal what he knows about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with the failed attempt on the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight, was initially “talking to people who detained him” but now has a public defender and “doesn’t have to,” John O. Brennan said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“We have different ways of obtaining information from individuals” in the criminal-justice process, Brennan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “A lot of people . . . understand what they’re facing, and their lawyers recognize that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements, [and] we’re going to pursue that.” Brennan told CNN’s “State of the Union” that other terrorism suspects have “given us very valuable information as they’ve gone through the plea-agreement process.”
Consider this excerpt:
Abdulmutallab’s father “said he was consorting with extremists in Yemen,” Brennan added. “. . . He was concerned about him, he wanted our help. That was one set of data. We had, though, other data within the intelligence system . . . that didn’t give us the clarity we needed to be able to map it and attach it to Abdulmutallab.”
Read the whole article here. Whiskey, tango, foxtrot…they’re going to offer the bomber a plea agreement?? Brennan states that, despite warnings from the bomber’s own father, the Administration didn’t have the “clarity” to determine Mr. Abdulmutallab was a threat. Offering him a plea agreement–through his court-appointed public defender–suggests the Administration won’t achieve “clarity” anytime soon.
