3 AM (Incompetence Revisited)

3 AM plus four days after getting the phone call the commenter in chief took a break from his vacation to tell us that the Terrorist we had already heard about was an isolated extremist.

Next we learned that the so called 50 minutes of questions (in which all actionable information was obtained) ended after Farouk was read his Miranda rights.  The White House would later claim that everything that could be gleaned—including that the ‘isolated extremist” was actually working for Al Qaeda, was one of many, and all operating out of Yemen—was obtained in that first 50 minutes of questioning,  a fact that somehow had not made its way into Mr. Obama’s speech four days after it happened.

When none of that was well received, the story changed again; Abdulmuttallab had in fact stopped talking and at that point was read his Miranda rights—in contradiction to all previous statements.

The interrogation—what of it there was—was left to the FBI because Obama had disbanded the CIA interrogations unit and replaced it (so he claimed) with HIG, a high value special interrogation unit that was never actually created and did not even exist to be called in to perform the interrogation.

Under pressure to explain these and other lapses and contradictions, the White House attempted to dilute responsibility (also known as fingerprinting) by stating that they had notified the intelligence agencies about the plan to Mirandize and prosecute Abdulmuttallab as a criminal, and having received no objection, read the terrorist his rights; except that the Agency heads in question had already testified to having not been consulted prior to the reading of Miranda rights to the terrorist.

Still swinging in the breeze, the Administration then complained that Republicans were making hay about the events and that several party leaders had been notified on Christmas Eve without objection to the Mirandizing of the suspect.  This is what the White House really means by Bi-partisan—we’ll gladly share the blame.  Except that the White House had only notified a few Republican leaders that the terrorist was in FBI custody.  Nothing was mentioned about Miranda rights.

The Administration then proceeded to misrepresent policy from the Bush years, mangle relevant court rulings, fabricate numbers of “terrorists” convicted under “civilian justice,” and promulgate all manner of contradiction on their own contradictions, while ignoring inside reports that the first 24 hours after his arrest the White House was busy looking for ways to tie the event to Bush era policies.

Finally, more than a month later, the Obama White House announced that the suspect was talking again; leaked by the White House, right after telling Republicans not to notify the press.  This was followed by proudly announcing that new vital intelligence had been gained 5 weeks after insisting they’d already gotten all the actionable intelligence available from the suspect before he was Mirandized on Christmas Eve.

National Review—from which the above time line is excerpted and paraphrased—calls this amateur hour.  But it is worse than that.  It is not just blatant proof that Hillary’s 3AM phone call commercial was based in truth; that calling these guys the “B team” is gracious and that a letter farther down the alphabet might be more appropriate; it is demonstrative of the serial abuse of facts for the sake of perception over which this administration obsesses.  It is campaign style damage control 24/7/365 for the sole purpose of making sure Obama does not look bad.

So How is that working out for you?