Word: abdulmutallab
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Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed attempt to bring down a jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day has helped to ignite a political battle over how best to handle and question detained terrorist suspects. The debate has brought attention to a specialized interrogation unit that the Obama Administration announced with great fanfare last August but that was not used in the "Undie-bomber" case - a situation that has become additional fuel for criticism...
However, HIG was not activated when Abdulmutallab was taken into custody, as Blair admitted at a Senate hearing in January. He said he was never consulted about deploying the interrogation unit when the young Nigerian was arrested in Detroit; the team of intelligence experts was never summoned. "We should have automatically deployed the HIG," he said. "We will now." More confusion followed: the next day, Blair issued a clarifying statement revealing that the unit wasn't even fully operational. (See pictures of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
Intelligence and law enforcement officials insist that while the HIG has not been finalized, intelligence units are deploying to interrogate suspects - including Abdulmutallab and David Headley, who was arrested in Chicago last year and has been linked to the Bombay massacre of 2008. At a hearing before the Senate's Select Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that HIG-like teams had been deployed since the fall, and CIA Director Leon Panetta said agency interrogators have accompanied them. This raised more questions whether the unit was functional. "It's moving along," was all Blair said. When committee...
After the Christmas Day incident over Detroit, the decision to interrogate Abdulmutallab not as an enemy combatant but as a civilian - he was read his Miranda rights - was made by Attorney General Eric Holder. After weeks of political sniping, the Department of Justice on Wednesday released a sharply worded letter from Holder to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell defending the decisions made in Detroit, saying that they were "fully consistent" with policies and practices of the department, the FBI and the government as a whole. Taking full responsibility for the decision to hold and indict Abdulmutallab in the federal court...
...government for both incapacitating terrorists and collecting intelligence from them. Removing this highly effective weapon from our arsenal would be as foolish as taking our military and intelligence options off the table against al- Qaeda, and as dangerous," Holder wrote. Separately, administration officials now also report that Abdulmutallab, who stopped talking after about 50 minutes in custody, has recently begun providing new information to interrogators after his family was brought to him from Nigeria...