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The Obama Administration is vindicating Bush antiterror policy. Dick Cheney is not the most popular of politicians, but when he offered a harsh assessment of the Obama Administration's approach to terrorism last May, his criticism stung—so much that the President gave a speech the same day that was widely seen as a direct response. Though neither man would admit it, eight months later political and security realities are forcing Mr. Obama's antiterror policies ever-closer to the former Vice President's. In fact, the President's changes in antiterror policy have never been as dramatic as he or his critics have advertised. His...

Almost 6 Months ago President Obama announced a new set of rules for the interrogation of terrorists. The President has approved new recommendations for the interrogation and transfer of suspected terrorists, which were created by a task force he set up shortly after taking office. The big headline is the creation of an interagency team of interrogators, which will be known as the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG). It will be placed administratively within the FBI, but the National Security Council (NSC) will provide what senior officials described as "strategic policy guidance." Although the officials were at some pains to...

General Michael Hayden is well-versed in the intelligence aspects of the War on Terror, he was appointed by Bill Clinton to head the NSA in 1999 a position he held for six years until George Bush appointed him to head the CIA. Hayden has been taken a look at what President Obama has been doing in the War on Terror and he is not pleased. Hayden has written a scathing review of Obama's handling of the terrorist threat especially that of the Christmas day Underwear Bomber: ....We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant...

Malaysia terror arrests linked to Detroit bomb attempt, officials say Syed Ibrahim Syed Noh, a lawyer and campaigner against the ISA, said that no one should be detained without a trial Richard Lloyd Parry, Asia Editor Twelve men arrested in Malaysia this month for alleged terrorist offences had connections to the Nigerian student accused of attempting to blow up a US passenger aircraft on Christmas Day, according to a report from Kuala Lumpur. The Malaysian Home Minister, Hishamuddin Hussein, refused to confirm the report in the New Straits Times, a newspaper which follows the lead of the Government. He insisted...

Terrorism suspects from Jordan, Nigeria, Syria and Yemen have been detained in Malaysia, activists say as a report linked them to the Nigerian behind the botched Christmas plane bombing. Malaysia announced on Wednesday it had arrested 10 people for "acts of terrorism" and said they were members of an international terror outfit tracked down in cooperation with foreign intelligence groups. The government-linked New Straits Times said the 10 were believed to be associated with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian student accused of trying to detonate explosives on a Northwest Airlines plane approaching Detroit. "It was learnt that foreign anti-terrorism agencies...

One of the most oft-asked questions since the "underwear bomber" was arrested on Christmas day is why was he treated as a domestic criminal instead of being turned over to to our intelligence agencies to be interrogated. As Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the Underwear Bomber, was fresh from the terrorist operations in Yemen, we could have gotten valuable information regarding al Qaeda's new set-up in Yemen. The word leaked out is immediately after his arrest Abdulmutallab sang like a canary, then he was read his Miranda rights,so he "lawyered-up" and stopped talking. If he had been turned over to the special...

On Christmas Day, a gentleman from Nigeria succeeded (effortlessly) in boarding a flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Pretty funny, huh? But the Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.

- The Homeland Security Department rather than the State Department should handle U.S. visas overseas to meet security threats, the chairman of the Senate homeland security committee said on Sunday. Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman raised the idea during a discussion on ABCs "This Week" of the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound plane on Dec 25. "I believe, incidentally, that we ought to take a look at taking the visa application and admission responsibility from the State Department. It doesn't really fit with foreign policy anymore," he said. "And in an age of terrorism, I think the Department of Homeland Security...

Liz Cheney's political advocacy group, Keep America Safe, has produced an ad entitled "100 Hours" which echoes some of the criticisms leveled by Cheney's father, Dick Cheney, against the slow response to the attempted Christmas bombing. The "100 Hours" ad has echoes of the hit TV show "24" in which super agent Jack Bauer regularly saves the world in the space of 24 hours. The difference is that the "100 Hours " ad by Liz Cheney's Keep America Safe group displays Obama administration officials claiming that "the system Liz Cheney's "Keep America Safe" Has New Anti-Obama Ad worked," and Barack...

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...

Here is video of former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey saying the "underwear bomber" terrorist is likely to have a good lawyer due to his father having a lot of money...(Video)Mukasey said that a "great opportunity" was missed in not having the terrorist "taken immediately and put in military custody and questioned" to gather intelligence. Mukasey said "this guy was willing to talk, he was babbling like a brook."

If you were in Washington DC earlier in the week, you may have seen an extra twinkling object flying in the night sky over the building that houses the Department of Homeland Security. That twinkling object was not a terrorist threat it was just the Fairy of Stupidity spreading his stupid dust over the office of the Director of Homeland Security. And that fairy dust is working very well on the Janet Napolitano maybe too well. Yesterday the woman charged with making sure that we don't get blown up by a terrorist, made her second really idiotic statement in less...

The White House today released its unclassified review summary of the administration failures surrounding the latest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the Christmas underwear bomber. Delayed twice reportedly over exactly what should and should not be declassified, President Obama made remarks at the release of information that for all intents and purposes told little or nothing new. At a presser following the release of the report, Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were asked what they found most shocking about the declassified review. “We didn’t know they had actually reached the point...

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...

This White House national security adviser James Jones said said this morning that the review would "shock" Americans with the fresh details it provides as to how U.S. security and intelligence systems failed to "connect the dots" leading up to the foiled Christmas Day attack on Northwest Flight 253. I have read the report, and quite frankly I am not shocked, the White House released nothing new, I was also underwhelmed by his comments. I will write about it more later, in the mean time, a transcript of the President's speech is below, along with embedded versions of the Security...

See me fly out of the airportOn your security monitor screenOut for all the virgins I can getIf you know what I meanAfricans to the left of meEuropeans to the rightAin’t got no gungot no knifeDon’t you know…airport security ain’t right.

There is that old saying, "almost doesn't count, except in horse shoes." It certainly doesn't count when trying to catch a terrorist with a bomb attached to his a private parts, designed to explode an airplane to smithereens over a major city. Today the LA Times discovered that the US learned some new intelligence about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab right after his plane took off from Amsterdam. Government Officials were going to interviewing the terrorist as soon as he landed in Detroit.

Abdul Alim Musa, is Imam of the Islam Mosque in Washington, DC, and an Islamist who believes that American Muslims are weak-minded because they don't believe in Jihad: "… [T]hey tell the weak-minded Muslims here in America, 'Don't talk about jihad.' One of the big leaders here got up and said, 'There's no jihad in Koran.' I say, He must be reading a different book, than we read, cause jihad, mujahadin … In fact Allah says in the Koran if can remember, [several words in Arabic]. This is what it says in the original language. What does that mean? That...

With each passing day we learn about a new hole in our defenses that allowed the Underwear Bomber on to Northwest Flight 253, with the purpose of scattering bit and pieces of airplane and human across the city of Detroit. On Saturday Newsweek revealed that on December 22nd, three days before the attempted underwear bombing, the President was warned that an attack might be imminent. Sunday saw the revelation that counterterrorism adviser John Brennan was briefed that al Qaeda was sending out terrorists with bombs in their briefs, and that one had almost blown up a Saudi prince. Today the...

Beginning at 12:00 AM this morning,anyone traveling from or through nations regarded as state sponsors of terrorism — as well as "other countries of interest" — will be required to go through enhanced screening techniques before boarding flights. The Transportation Security Administration said those heightened security measures would include full-body pat-downs, carry on bag searches, full-body scanning and explosive detection technology. The U.S. State Department lists Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria as state sponsors of terrorism. The other countries whose passengers will face enhanced screening include Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. According to...