MORE GOOD ADVICE; AGAIN, WILL THEY TAKE IT? – AT 6:55 P.M. ET:  Former CIA director Michael Hayden challenges the Obama administration's approach to the war on terror.  Obamans don't seem to learn too quickly.  Maybe they'll learn from this:

We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant the protections of our Constitution before we had adequately interrogated him. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is not "an isolated extremist." He is the tip of the spear of a complex al-Qaeda plot to kill Americans in our homeland.

In the 50 minutes the FBI had to question him, agents reportedly got actionable intelligence. Good. But were there any experts on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the room (other than Abdulmutallab)? Was there anyone intimately familiar with any National Security Agency raw traffic to, from or about the captured terrorist? Did they have a list or photos of suspected recruits?

And here's an important lesson on intelligence gathering, some of the best background information we've had so far on the subject:

When questioning its detainees, the CIA routinely turns the information provided over to its experts for verification and recommendations for follow-up. The responses of these experts -- "Press him more on this, he knows the details" or "First time we've heard that" -- helps set up more detailed questioning.

Remember that paragraph the next time Eric Holder reads a terrorist his Miranda rights five minutes after they rip the bomb from his body.

The root of our current problem:

Two days after his inauguration, President Obama issued an executive order that limited all interrogations by the U.S. government to the techniques authorized in the Army Field Manual. The CIA had not seen the final draft of the order, let alone been allowed to comment, before it was issued. I thought that odd since the order was less a legal document -- there was no claim that the manual exhausted the universe of lawful techniques -- than a policy one: These particular lawful techniques would be all that the country would need, at least for now.

In a phrase, that paragraph tells us why elections are important.  The wrong guy won.

In August, seemingly again in contradiction to the president's policy of not looking backward and over the objections of the CIA, Justice pushed to release the CIA inspector general's report on the interrogation program. Then Justice decided to reopen investigations of CIA officers that had been concluded by career prosecutors years ago, even though Panetta and seven of his predecessors said that doing so would be unfair, unwarranted and harmful to the agency's current mission.

Add this to the entire, sorry record of Eric Holder's Justice Department in the last year.

Intelligence officers need to know that someone has their back. After the Justice memos were released in April, CIA officers began to ask whether the people doing things that were currently authorized would be dragged through this kind of public knothole in five years. No one could guarantee that they would not.

Does the term "leftist lawyers recruited by Eric Holder" come to mind?  The former dean of the Harvard Law School is solicitor general.  The former dean of the Yale Law School gives legal advice to the State Department.  These are not conservatives.

Some may celebrate that the current Justice Department's perspective on the war on terrorism has become markedly more dominant in the past year. We should probably understand the implications of that before we break out the champagne. That apparently no one recommended on Christmas Day that Abdulmutallab be handled, at least for a time, as an enemy combatant should be concerning. That our director of national intelligence, Denny Blair, bravely said as much during congressional testimony this month is cause for hope.

Blair doesn't seem to have any power.  Went to the wrong school. 

The final insult:

There's a final oddity. In August, the government unveiled the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group for questioning al-Qaeda and announced that the FBI would begin questioning CIA officers about the alleged abuses in the 2004 inspector general's report. They are apparently still getting organized for the al-Qaeda interrogations. But the interrogations of CIA personnel are well underway.

That reflects the values of the administration, the law schools and firms from which it recruited senior personnel, and the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party.  And they show no signs of changing.

January 31, 2010