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Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi Muslim living in Brooklyn, really hated Christmas. He hated Christmas so much that he used Christmas tree lights (along with a battery and some wire) as a trigger for a pipe bomb. He filled the pipe bomb with screws so that when it went off, metal shrapnel would tear bloody holes through morning commuters in Manhattan. Wearing a hooded jacket and a backpack to cover the pipe bomb strapped to his body, Ullah got on the F Train at the 18th Avenue elevated subway station off Little Bangladesh. Like the Duke Ellington song says, he switched...

Mohamud is appealing his 2013 conviction on grounds that he was entrapped by undercover federal agents posing as al-Qaida members and the warrantless surveillance of his foreign communications violated his constitutional rights. It marks the first time a federal appeals court is considering whether the National Security Agency’s foreign surveillance programs — the same ones that came under scrutiny after the Edward Snowden leaks a few years ago — violate the Fourth Amendment rights of criminal defendants. Stephen Sady, Mohamud’s public defender, and another attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union urged the court for a new trial on grounds...

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And Friday it almost reaped the bitter fruits of that decision. Leftist/Jihadist Alliance Update: “Politically correct Portland rejected feds who saved city from terrorist attack,” by Byron York in The Examiner, November 28 (thanks to Pamela Geller): What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland’s leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years. In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom...

War On Terror: The Justice Department employs nine lawyers previously involved in the defense of terrorist detainees. This is a colossal conflict of interest. Just whose side are they on? From the dropping of a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party to the decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Muhammed in a civilian court within blocks of where the World Trade Center once stood, the actions and attitudes of the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder toward the thugs and terrorists who threaten us has grown curiouser and curiouser. We may now have a clue as...

Holder's decision to Mirandize the Christmas bomber was bad enough. Telling the world he was talking again waseven worse Security: The administration says the Christmas bomber is now cooperating with authorities. We thought they got all the information he had in a 50-minute chat. So just why are we letting our enemies know he's talking? In any war, it's vitally important that you know what your enemy is planning and doing, just as it's important that your actions and plans remain secret. And when you know about your enemy's plans it's important they don't know that you know. We were...

The Washington Post supported the Obama administration's treatment of Christmas day bomber Umar Abdulmuttalab as a criminal rather than as an enemy combatant. In an editorial published yesterday, It has nevertheless retracted its support. The Post writes that it "originally supported the administration's decision in the Abdulmutallab case, assuming that it had been made after due consideration. But the decision to try Mr. Abdulmutallab turns out to have resulted not from a deliberative process but as a knee-jerk default to a crime-and-punishment model." The Obama administration's treatment of Abdulmutallab as a criminal accorded the constitutional rights of an American citizen...

The principle of Universal Jurisdiction has been, and continues to be, an important tool in the legal practitioner’s tool box and an essential means of achieving justice for international crimes. Unfortunately, the principle has also become a political device employed for far more cynical means and far less noble purposes. In the early 1960’s, Israel was one of the first states to invoke the principle of universal jurisdiction in its groundbreaking trial against Adolf Eichmann, the “architect of the Holocaust”.

National Security Takes a Hit Bethany Stotts, January 21, 2010 A little less than a year after an academic and other groups wrote the Secretaries of State, Homeland Security and Justice demanding that the Obama Administration end President Bush’s “practice of ‘ideological exclusion’” in its visa policy, it seems that two Muslim academics previously barred entry could soon be making their way to American soil with visas in hand. “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has signed orders effectively reversing the Bush Administration’s decisions to bar two prominent foreign Muslim scholars, Adam Habib and Tariq Ramadan, from entry into the...

al Quaida Assessed Sheila Archambault, January 20, 2010 As the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack proves, it is integral for the Obama Administration to address the vulnerabilities that continue to exist in the U.S.’s aviation, maritime and border systems, a former government official said. The good that has come out of the foiled Christmas Day attack is that it helped concentrate the public and administration on the urgency of the threat of terrorism, said Clark Kent Ervin, the director of the homeland security program at the Aspen Institute, at a Cato Institute event analyzing the first year of the Obama...

President Barack Obama is under fire over claims that the Christmas Day underwear bomber was "singing like a canary" until he was treated as an ordinary criminal and advised of his right to silence. The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel. The potential significance became chillingly clear this weekend when it was reported that shortly after his...

Check out this passage from the unclassified six-page summary of the President Barack Obama’s review of the intelligence failures that led to the attempted attack by the Knicker Bomber on Flight 253 on Christmas Day: Mr. Abdulmutallab possessed a U.S. visa, but this fact was not correlated with the concerns of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father about Mr. Abdulmutallab’s potential radicalization. A misspelling of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name initially resulted in the State Department believing he did not have a valid U.S. visa. So this means that the US government’s computers apparently don’t have an equivalent of Google’s “Did You Mean?” tool that...

Well, well, well in the words of president Soetoro’s former pastor of over twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “The chickens have come home to roost. Well almost. If the terrorist chicken, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had not laid an egg or a Christmas day dud instead of a bomb in this case, 290 people would have been slaughtered in a merciless act of terrorism. President Soetoro finger pointed at the American intelligence community for this recent failure of security and vowed to get to the bottom of this terrorist breech of the American people’s safety. But sometimes one simply must...

Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber’s attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of Sept. 11. But it was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate. That stands in sharp contrast to the withering criticism President Barack Obama has received from Republicans...

Before on the DrudgeReport there was a story of a passenger on the flight with the bomber, who gave a different account of what happened when the passengers were taken off the plane at the airport than what the FBI is saying. Drudge quickly removed the links. What do you think of his account?