Partisan Rancor Follows Terrorism Announcement

In their annual threat briefing for legislators last week, the administration's top intelligence experts ran through a long list of adversaries, from a theocratic Iran obfuscating on its nuclear intentions, to a crumbling North Korean military increasingly reliant on a nuclear deterrent, to unknown cyberfoes capable of wreaking havoc on the nation's power grids and financial systems.

But it was the warnings about terrorism that most concerned lawmakers. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA boss Leon Panetta, and FBI Director Robert Mueller all said that they were "certain" that mounting an attack against the U.S. homeland in the next three to six months was a top al Qaeda priority. "The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11," Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee. "It is that al Qaeda is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect." Despite the dramatic warnings, none of the spy chiefs said that they had evidence of a specific plot, nor did they explain the rationale for their three-to-six-month time frame.

Future threats aside, the House and Senate intelligence committee hearings were quickly consumed with political infighting. Intelligence officials sat quietly as lawmakers lit into one another over the number and extent of legal rights due to terrorism suspects. That issue in particular has been seized on by the GOP after the Justice Department decided on a civilian prosecution for the case against Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged attempted Christmas Day airliner bomber.

Saying that the quality of the public debate on the failed attack has not been "particularly good," Blair spoke with unusual frankness to lawmakers during the second day of hearings. "I've been surprised by the combination of reality and politics having to do with this issue," he said. "We're just trying to bring intelligence and law enforcement to bear to get the right information, to make sure that those who threaten our country get behind bars, and I just don't want to go into the political side of it."

Republicans have been unusually caustic in their attacks on the administration over the Abdulmutallab case. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, historically moderate in tone on national security issues, charged last week that the decision to try the Nigerian in a civilian court, the standard practice from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, was evidence of "blindness" in the fight against terrorism. "This administration cannot see a foreign terrorist even when he stands right in front of them," she said. Obama administration counter terrorism chief John Brennan said on Meet The Press last weekend, that at least four senior Republican leaders, including the minority leaders and the ranking minority members of the two intelligence committees, were told at the time that the suspect was in FBI custody and made no objections.

Yet on the same day that lawmakers bickered over Abdulmutallab and the administration appeared to backtrack from plans to try terrorist suspects in New York City, a Manhattan jury quietly returned a guilty verdict against Aafia Siddiqui, dubbed "Lady al Qaeda" by the tabloids. Described by the FBI in 2004 as an al Qaeda "facilitator," her brief and uneventful trial for attempting to shoot the U.S. soldiers interrogating her in Afghanistan in 2008 has been a quiet triumph for the Justice Department. Siddiqui will be sentenced in May and could receive a life term.