Christmas Day Bomber Pleads Not Guilty

The lawyered-up underwear bomber pleads not guilty in his initial court appearance in Detroit federal court:

Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the man charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on December 25, pleaded not guilty Friday to six federal charges.

Wearing a white T-shirt, too-long khaki pants that were rolled up several times at the ankles and blue sneakers, the 23-year-old Nigerian national walked slowly into the federal courtroom, ankles shackled and in apparent pain after having suffered second- and third-degree burns in the flight.

Asked by the judge whether he was taking any medication, he replied he was taking painkillers but that he understood the six charges he faced.

AbdulMutallab faces the following charges according to the federal indictment from the office of Barbara L. McQuade, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan:

• attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction
• attempted murder within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States
  
• willful attempt to destroy and wreck an aircraft within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States
• willfully placing a destructive device in, upon and in proximity to an aircraft within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States which was likely to endanger the safety of such aircraft, and
• two counts of possession of a firearm/destructive in furtherance of a crime of violence

In a move that will make us all safer, the U.S. State Department announced on January 5 that it had revoked AbdulMutallab's visa.

Intelligence Reviewer Has Major Conflict of Interest

Remember all that cockamamie campaign rhetoric about banning all those horrible lobbyists from the administration? According to Politico, never mind about all that:

President Barack Obama promised a “thorough review” of the government’s terrorist watch list system after a Nigerian man reported to U.S. government officials by his father to have radicalized and gone missing last month was allowed to board a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit that he later allegedly tried to blow up without any additional security screening.

Yet the individual Obama has chosen to lead the review, White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, served for 35 years in the CIA, helped design the current watch list system and served as interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center, whose role is under review.

In the three years before joining the Obama administration, Brennan was president and CEO of The Analysis Corp., an intelligence contracting firm that worked closely with the National Counterterrorism Center and other U.S. government intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies on developing terrorism watch lists.

In the meantime, Newsweek claims that Obama received pre-Christmas intel about terror threats to the homeland:

President Barack Obama received a high-level briefing only three days before Christmas about possible holiday-period terrorist threats against the US, Newsweek has learned. The briefing was centered on a written report, produced by US intelligence agencies, entitled "Key Homeland Threats", a senior US official said.

The senior Administration official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that nowhere in this document was there any mention of Yemen, whose Al-Qaeda affiliate is now believed to have been behind the unsuccessful Christmas Day attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a transatlantic airliner with a bomb hidden in his underpants. However, the official declined to disclose any other information about the substance of the briefing, including what kind of specific warnings, if any, the President was given about possibly holiday attacks and whether Yemen came up during oral discussions.

By the way, as we've mentioned previously, the media used to go nuts about Bush's Crawford, Texas, vacations, but have they said word one about Obama's extended Hawaiian holiday in the midst of a terror attack?

In a related development, Obama reached back into the Bush administration to appoint Howard Schmidt as White House cybersecurity "czar." Schmidt, a former special cybersecurity advisor to President George W. Bush, specialized in computer security and forensics as an investigator for the FBI, the Air Force, and local law enforcement. In the private sector, he held executive positions related to cyber-security at Microsoft and eBay.