My full-length extended remix piece about Dennis Blair’s awkward Flight 253 testimony and his place in the Obama administration is out from the Washington Independent.* A sample: “We did not invoke the HIG,” Blair said. “In this instance, we should have.” The HIG — which reports to the FBI and the National Security Council, not the [...]

For the first time I feel as if I understand what it means to read a misleading intelligence report about a looming catastrophe. The text is superficially true; there is not a single false word on the page. But the meaning of the text doesn’t survive scrutiny: one sentence diminishes a particular aspect of the [...]

Not that I write about healthcare, but this Dan Pfeiffer post is… well… On Next Steps for Health Reform Posted by Dan Pfeiffer on January 20, 2010 at 05:46 PM EST Right now there are a lot of discussions going on about the best path forward. But let’s be clear that the President’s preference is [...]

Wow. Apparently I “misconstrued” Dennis Blair’s clear statement that the HIG should have interrogated Abdulmutallab. Only thing is: the HIG isn’t actually operational. “My remarks today before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs have been misconstrued,” Blair said in a statement just emailed to reporters. “The FBI interrogated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab when [...]

I dealt with Al Felzenberg a lot in 2004. Felzenberg was the communications director of the 9/11 Commission. I was reporting on the 9/11 Commission. He was astonishingly helpful. It turned out we even both went to Rutgers. I haven’t spoken to him in years, but I thought he was a genuinely nice guy, and [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 048-10 January 20, 2010 DOD Identifies Air Force Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of an airman who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Tech. Sgt. Adam K. Ginett, 29, of Knightdale, N.C., died Jan. 19 near Kandahar Air Field, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered from an improvised explosive device. He [...]

I know, I know. This is Scott Brown Freakout Day, and no one cares about national security right now. So I’ll make this short. Dennis Blair has had a vexed year as director of national intelligence. Most importantly, Blair picked a fight with Leon Panetta, the CIA director, over who controls the top intelligence official [...]

Or at least if this embed code works correctly I am. If not, uh, click on the Grit link! We’re talking about terrrrrrrrrrrorism…

From a joint statement from DNI Dennis Blair & Michael Leiter of NCTC before Lieberman & Collins’ committee: [A]lthough Mr. Abdulmutallab was identified as a known or suspected terrorist and entered into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE)—and this information was in turn widely available throughout the Intelligence Community—the derogatory information associated with him did [...]

Now’s a great time to start racial and ethnic profiling for airline passengers. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is going to release a report about a few people who converted to radical forms of Islam in prison and travelled to Yemen upon release. What do they look like? An additional concern, it says, “is a [...]