My analysis Friday was confirmed by the Associated Press yesterday. FBI Director Robert Mueller did not tell the whole truth during his testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The FBI agents on the ground did not make the decision to read Miranda warnings to Flight 253 bomber Umar Farook Abdulmuttalab. Instead, the Department of Justice directed them to do that after the first 50-minute interrogation. (Hat tip to Stephen Hayes for the link to the AP report.)

The DOJ was reckless. Even though security measures were ramped up abroad and 10 hours had elapsed, planes continued to take off for the U.S. and body scanners and police-grade pat down searches would not have detected that same explosive hidden in a body cavity. It was also unnecessary as everything Abdulmuttalab said after the passengers pounced on him and retrieved the bomb is not needed to win a conviction and his being sentenced to life in prison.

The AP seemed to deliberately obscure the order of events. Let’s flesh it out:

FBI agents from the Detroit bureau arrived at the hospital around 2:15 p.m., and were briefed by the Customs agents and officers as Abdulmutallab received medical treatment. Shortly after 3:30 p.m., FBI agents began interviewing the suspect in his hospital room, joined by a CBP officer and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. The suspect spoke openly, said one official, talking in detail about what he’d done and the planning that went into the attack. Other counterterrorism officials speaking on condition of anonymity said it was during this questioning that he admitted he had been trained and instructed in the plot by al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. The interview lasted about 50 minutes. Before they began questioning Abdulmutallab, the FBI agents decided not to give him his Miranda warnings providing his right to remain silent.
…
Abdulmutallab’s interview ended when the suspect was given medication and the investigators decided it would be better to let the effects of the drugs wear off before pressing him further. He would not be questioned again for more than five hours. By that point, officials said, FBI bosses in Washington had decided a new interrogation team was needed. They made that move in case the lack of a Miranda warning or the suspect’s medical condition at the time of the earlier conversations posed legal problems later on for prosecutors.
…
Based on the instructions from Washington, the second interview was conducted by different FBI agents and others with the local joint terrorism task force. Such a move is not unusual in cases where investigators or prosecutors want to protect themselves from challenges to evidence or statements. By bringing in a so-called “clean team” of investigators to talk to the suspect, federal officials aimed to ensure that Abdulmutallab’s statements would still be admissible if the failure to give him his Miranda warning led a judge to rule out the use of his first admissions.

In other words, the ‘clean team’ advised Abdulmuttalab that he could remain silent, tried to interrogate him, and he remained silent. A suspect can invoke at any time. And when a suspect persistently remains silent after waiving their rights, it forces law enforcement to discontinue questioning and provide them with legal counsel as trial and appellate judges often rule the suspect invoked by demonstration.

Had Abdulmuttalab kept talking, even non-coercive interrogation using the proven method of having him add to what agents already knew, i.e. from the National Counterterrorism Center’s intelligence data base, would likely have added greatly to our national security.

Attorney General Eric Holder knows who at the DOJ told the FBI agents to advise Abdulmuttalab of his rights. The Senate should ask him if he made the call and if not, at what pay grade below the President are national security policy decisions being made. They should also ask him for a copy of the Executive Order where Barack Obama delegated that authority.

Update, 9:30 AM, January 25, 2010: Stephen Hayes at The Weekly Standard has more this morning (”Duh!’ The nation’s top intelligence official speaks.’)

At the very moment Abdulmutallab was read his rights in Michigan, a dossier on his activities sat undistributed in the computer of a junior analyst at the CIA. (The analyst, the New York Times reported, was waiting for a photograph that had not yet reached his desk.) We know that the bomber’s father provided detailed information on his son at a meeting with U.S. officials at the embassy in Abuja, Nigeria. We know that some part of the U.S. government had learned of an “Umar Farouk” from intercepted communications between al Qaeda operatives in Yemen and elsewhere. We know that he was trained by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula while in Yemen. We know that he was active in jihadist circles when he lived and studied in London and that among his associates was a former Guantánamo Bay detainee.

He was not asked about any of this, nor was any of this information used as the basis for probing questions about Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which Obama officials themselves have identified as a growing threat to the homeland. The Weekly Standard has learned that there was no communication between the National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI “agents on the ground” in Detroit before they interrogated Abdulmutallab and before he shut up.

Update II, 10:40 AM, January 25, 2010: Byron York at the Washington Examiner weighed in as well and this illustrates the deliberate attempt to obscure who made the call:

Wallace pressed. “But we now find out he was interrogated for 50 minutes,” he said to Gibbs. “When they came back, he was read his Miranda rights and he clammed up.”

“No,” Gibbs answered. “Again, he was interrogated. Valuable intelligence was gotten based on those interrogations. And I think the Department of Justice and the — made the right decision, as did those FBI agents.”

If what Gibbs, and unnamed officials previously to the AP, said were true (and it is not true), the FBI needs to bring a second clean team as the purpose of the first one was to serve as a legal backstop after Abdulmuttalab was questioned without Miranda warnings being afforded prior to the first 50-minute interrogation. Is today’s FBI the new Keystone Cops?

Update III, 11:00 AM January 25, 2010: Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com adds:

What is apparent here is that the law-enforcement model of counterterrorism cost us an opportunity to get valuable intel from an active terrorist. The interrogators were more concerned about a judge in a criminal court than they were about other terrorist attacks that may be coming against the US. We had an opportunity to learn about contacts, places, leadership, any active recruiting cells in London or Nigeria, all of which would have taken longer than 50 minutes to unwind out of a man in excruciating pain from setting his own [testicles] on fire.