Underwear Bomber Talking Again - Too Bad it is over a Month Late

It’s time for a little offense in the war on terror -- domestic front, that is.

(And the countdown is on until the first withdrawal.)

Just when you thought it was the economy, because at least it wasn’t about health care, President Obama’s national security policies are getting the full Washington treatment -- and the full pushback, too.

Between the New York reaction to plans for Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the congressional push to shelve plans to try terror suspects on US soil, and the the severe Hill reaction to the ways in which the “underwear bomber” has been questioned -- there’s no quarter for the president in this debate.

But the White House is fighting back with the big weapons: Senior intelligence and military officials are leading the charge, in an unusually broad and blunt way -- insulating, perhaps, the political side from some of the fallout. (A fallout that will, inevitably, involve concessions: There’s no way these funding amendments ever get to the floor in Congress.)

As they have with “don’t ask, don’t tell,” with military leaders getting out further than even the president himself in explaining the rationale and the process, this is using the troops you’ve got in a high-stakes battle.

Suddenly, we know an awful lot about the fact that a terrorism suspect is talking, and how he started talking again.

“The Nigerian man arrested on Christmas Day for allegedly trying to explode a bomb on a plane arriving in Detroit has begun talking again to authorities, officials said Tuesday, a development that is likely to ratchet up the debate over whether he should be tried in federal court or before a military tribunal,” Richard A. Serrano and Greg Miller write in the Los Angeles Times.

“The family of the failed Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, played a pivotal role in getting their son to start cooperating with federal authorities in sharing information about Al Qaeda, a senior administration official said Tuesday evening,” ABC’s Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller report. “Abdulmuttalab has been cooperating with authorities and sharing intelligence since last Thursday, another administration official told ABC News.” - ABC News Story

Obama can and will try and put a spin on how good of a job he did. However, the bad news is that it is now old intelligence (over a month older) and everyone that this person had contact with has had the time to move or change their plans.