Senior Obama administration officials revealed late Tuesday they've
secretly gained the cooperation of family members of Umar Farouk
AbdulMutallab to help get the Christmas Day airline bomb suspect
talking.
The cooperation effort has led to actionable
intelligence that could help prevent terror attempts on U.S. soil, the
senior officials said.
The revelation is part of an aggressive
attempt by the White House to push back on Republican claims the Obama
administration mishandled the terror investigation, with AbdulMutallab
being read his Miranda rights shortly after he began cooperating with
investigators.
After giving the U.S. some information in the
early stages of the probe, AbdulMutallab stopped talking about his
attempt to blow up an airliner with a bomb hidden in his underwear.
The
senior administration officials disclosed that on January 1, just days
after the attempted terror attack, two FBI agents secretly flew to
Lagos, Nigeria, to meet with officials of the CIA and the State
Department. They began an extensive investigation and tried to work
with AbdulMutallab's family in hopes of gaining his cooperation.
The
U.S. officials later traveled to Nigeria's capital city, Abuja, and
eventually gained the trust of two unidentified relatives of the
suspect.
On January 17, the FBI agents secretly flew back to the U.S. with the two relatives in order to work with the suspect.
One
senior Obama administration official said the family members privately
conveyed to the suspect they "had complete trust in the U.S. system"
and they believed he "would be treated fairly" by the Obama
administration.
The senior administration officials said that since AbdulMutallab
began talking to investigation again last week, he has been cooperating
on a daily basis. The officials added the information gained from the
interrogations has been disseminated throughout the intelligence
community.
One of the senior Obama officials, who bluntly said
the Republican attacks have "frustrated the hell out of me," asserted
that gaining the trust of the family was the best way to handle the
case and helped the administration gain valuable intelligence from the
suspect, who is believed to have ties to an al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen.
"It
could be used to disrupt other attacks," one of the senior Obama
officials said of the intelligence gleaned from AbdulMutallab in the
interrogations, who added the president has been getting regular
updates on what the suspect has been revealing.
Sen. Susan
Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the Homeland Security
Committee, charged Saturday in the GOP weekly radio and Internet
address that the White House botched the handling of AbdulMutallab.
"The Obama administration appears to have a blind spot when it comes to the war on terrorism," she said.
In releasing the new information, senior
administration officials were direct about saying they're trying to
show the case has been handled properly and the Obama administration is
doing all it can to keep the country safe from future attacks.
One
of the senior administration officials said, "We are in a very active
war against al Qaeda" and "very experienced individuals who know what
they're doing" are handling the interrogations well, despite the
charges by Republicans.
"We'll leave it to them, not politicians in Washington," said this senior administration official.
A
second senior administration official suggested that the U.S. did not
lose any valuable intelligence by taking extra time to get the
suspect's cooperation through his family.
Pressed
on reports suggesting the intelligence being gained in the new
interrogations is not stale, this second official said: "I would not
disagree with that at all."
Comments (0)
Tell friend
Print
