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Obama administration officials were flabbergasted Wednesday when Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair testified that an alleged Qaeda operative who tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day should have been questioned by a special interrogation unit that doesn't exist, rather than the FBI. One senior official described the comments by Blair—the U.S. government's top intelligence official—as misinformed on multiple levels and all the more damaging because they immediately fueled Republican criticism that the administration mishandled the Christmas Day incident in its treatment of the accused Qaeda operative as a criminal suspect rather than an enemy combatant....

(A half-decent column by MrArbitrage) "...It reminds me of a scene from the cult classic film “This is Spinal Tap” where Nigel, the heavy metal guitarist is showing off his custom Marshall amplifier to the interviewer (Rob Reiner). As Nigel boasts about how other amplifiers only go to 10 while -his- goes to 11. Reiner asks “Nigel” the question...".

Tech Shares Shine On Intel, But U.S. Data A WorryJanuary 15, 2010 By Umesh Desai HONG KONG (Reuters) - Technology shares jumped in Asia on Friday after better-than-expected earnings from sector bellwether Intel, but stocks elsewhere in the region were largely subdued amid fresh doubts about the strength of the U.S. economic recovery. Tepid U.S. retail sales data and a rise in jobless claims lifted Treasuries and provided a lead for government bonds in Japan and South Korea as investors bet U.S. interest rates will be kept very low for a prolonged period to give the economy time to get...

Intel Just Blew The Doors Off Joe Weisenthal Jan. 14, 2010, 4:19 PM Chipmaker Intel (INTC) just delivered a huge positive surprise on earnings ($.40 vs. expected $.30) and a killer top line ($10.6 billion vs $10.2 billion). The stock is soaring after hours. Guidance is looking strong as well. Its Q1 guidance of $9.7 billion blows past consensus of $9.3 billion. Giddy up!

Nearly every public statement by President Barack Obama these days contains a reference or two to "my counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, John Brennan." Once a rare TV guest, he did four Sunday shows back-to-back. White House briefings and releases are peppered with mentions of the newly ubiquitous adviser – sometimes referred to simply as "John" by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Some of Brennan’s associates even think the White House is maneuvering him to become Director of National Intelligence or CIA director in time. Taken together, it's an abrupt step into the public eye by an intelligence veteran who has...

Belmont Club January 7th, 2010 5:54 pmThe needle in the haystack Today President Obama described the steps he was taking in order to improve the defense against terrorism. The video of his remarks is below. His thesis is simple. Intelligence analysis failed. The raw data existed to potentially support pattern recognition, but nobody recognized the pattern. President Obama announced general steps to improve the analysis. embedded by Embedded Video YouTube DirektThe second broad measure announced was an additional investment in newer and more stringent bomb detection technologies in aviation security. Taken together, both steps represent a lot of effort....

Eric Holder’s Justice Department rushed to file an indictment Wednesday against Flight 253 terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The telling document is a monument to lost opportunity. Come hell or high water, the Obama administration will press ahead with its commitment to treat al-Qaeda’s war against the United States as a crime wave best managed by the federal courts. “Al-Qaeda,” in fact, is a term you will not find in the bare-bones, seven-page charging instrument. Nor will you encounter such words as “Yemen,” “jihad,” “terrorism” — neither “Islamic” or “Islamist.” And if you’re looking for the names of any co-conspirators —...

Exclusive: FBI and Pentagon Missed Red Flag that Hasan Was E-mailing Qaeda Cleric, Who's also Linked to Abdulmutallab CBS) Less than a month after major Nidal Hasan allegedly killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, the Pentagon's top intelligence officer sent the White House a report detailing an earlier failure to connect the dots. It reads like a dress rehearsal for the Detroit bomber case, reports CBS News chief national security correspondent David Martin. According to that still-classified report, the terrorism task force responsible for determining whether Hasan posed a threat never saw all 18 e-mails he exchanged with that...

WASHINGTON – The White House is not expected to announce the firing of any officials over intelligence failures — for now anyway — as President Barack Obama prepares to tell the nation more about a botched terrorist attack over Detroit and what else he will do to beef up security. Eager to fix a glaring breakdown in intelligence sharing and get the incident behind him, Obama will speak Thursday about a declassified account of the near catastrophe on Christmas Day. The White House also plans to release a copy of the report with some detail stripped away for security reasons....

Pressure On Barack Obama To Reveal What Britain Said About Detroit Bomber Barack Obama is under pressure to disclose what information MI5 passed to the American authorities about the Detroit bomber after Downing Street disclosed that a file had been "shared" with the CIA in 2008. Robert Winnett, Toby Harnden and Duncan Gardham 05 Jan 2010 Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab Photo: EPA After initially denying that they had received British intelligence, senior American sources confirmed last night that they were "reviewing" what British information had been received on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The admission is embarrassing for the White House and threatens...

US Releases Iranian-backed Terrorist Behind murder of US Troops The British are all smiles over the release of Peter Moore, a British citizen who was held hostage by an Iranian-backed Shia terror group in Iraq. But there is little talk about the price paid to secure Moore's release. The US military has freed Qais Qazali, the leader of the Asaib al Haq, or League of the Righteous, as well as his brother Laith, several Qods Force officers, and more than 100 members of the terror group, in exchange for Moore. And that isn't all. The British also received the corpses...

The top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform committee called for an investigation into the botched terrorist attack on-board a plane to Detroit, saying that various counter terrorist agencies are “reverting to their pre 9/11 ways.” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said that recent events have “exposed a sobering reality that the very failures that made us vulnerable before 9/11 still threaten our homeland security today.” “There was a breakdown in communication that impacts numerous government entities and this committee should investigate and hold hearings immediately,” Issa said in a news release. Issa said he called Chairman Ed Towns...

In what is shaping up as a major intelligence debacle on Obama's watch, Dennis Blair looms as the official most likely to be thrown under the Obama Bus. (You may recall him as the National Intelligence Director who suggested that we not only release Gitmo detainees to live here among us but also put them on public welfare so American taxpayers could pay for the privilege of living side-by-side with jihadists dedicated to killing them). It's worth remembering, though, that the Office of the National Intelligence Director, like the Department of Homeland Security, is an ill-considered legacy of the vastly...

The CIA was tracking a person of interest known as "The Nigerian" - who was in fact airline bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - as early as August, CBS News reports. The connection between "The Nigerian" and Abdulmutallab was not made when the 23-year-old's father contacted the U.S. embassy in Nigeria in November to warn them of his son's radicalization. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said the intelligence agency did not have Abdulmutallab's name until November.

HONOLULU – President Barack Obama said Tuesday that the intelligence community had bits of information that should have been pieced together that would have triggered "red flags" and possibly prevented the Christmas Day attempted terror attack on a Detroit-bound airliner. "There was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security," Obama said. Senior U.S. officials told The Associated Press that intelligence authorities are now looking at conversations between the suspect in the failed attack and at least one al-Qaida member. They did not say how these communications with the suspect, Umar Farouk...

SANTA CLARA, Calif., December 16, 2009 – Intel Corporation issued the following statement regarding the suit filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC): "Intel has competed fairly and lawfully. Its actions have benefitted consumers. The highly competitive microprocessor industry, of which Intel is a key part, has kept innovation robust and prices declining at a faster rate than any other industry. The FTC's case is misguided. It is based largely on claims that the FTC added at the last minute and has not investigated. In addition, it is explicitly not based on existing law but is instead intended to...

FTC says Silicon Valley giant also trying to dominate graphics chip arena SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Intel Corp. has made peace with arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., but the Federal Trade Commission's suit against the chip behemoth points to the rise of its new nemesis on the legal front -- Nvidia Corp.The FTC complaint focuses on Intel's alleged anticompetive behavior against AMD in the market for central processing units, or CPUs, that run personal computers. But it also zeroed in on the market for graphics processing units, or GPUs as graphics processors are known, an arena where Nvidia and Intel...

NEW YORK – The Federal Trade Commission is suing Intel Corp., accusing the world's biggest chip maker of using its size to snuff out competition. The FTC says Intel, which makes the microprocessors that run personal computers, has shut rivals out of the marketplace. In the process, the FTC says Intel has deprived consumers of choice and stifled innovation in the chip industry. Intel has faced similar charges for years and has denied any wrongdoing. The lawsuit comes after a recent $1.25 billion settlement with rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. over similar claims.

We just got off the phone with Nick Knupffer of Intel, who confirmed something that has long been speculated upon: the fate of Larrabee. As of today, the first Larrabee chip’s retail release has been canceled. This means that Intel will not be releasing a Larrabee video card or a Larrabee HPC/GPGPU compute part. The Larrabee project itself has not been canceled however, and Intel is still hard at work developing their first entirely in-house discrete GPU. The first Larrabee chip (which for lack of an official name, we’re going to be calling Larrabee Prime) will be used for the...

Intel has unveiled a prototype chip that packs 48 separate processing cores on to a chunk of silicon the size of a postage stamp. The Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC), as it is known contains 1.3 billion transistors, the tiny on-off switches that underpin chip technology. Each processing core could, in theory, run a separate operating system. Currently, top-end chips for desktop computers typically contain four separate processors. Intel and Rival AMD will both launch six-core devices in 2010, allowing computers to simultaneously tackle a number of complex tasks, such as processing graphics. 'Tiny islands' The chip has won the "cloud"...