{"id":264438,"date":"2010-02-02T10:02:23","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T15:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=75493"},"modified":"2010-02-02T10:02:23","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T15:02:23","slug":"gates-defends-the-administration-on-abdulmutallab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/264438","title":{"rendered":"Gates Defends the Administration on Abdulmutallab"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Carrying forward a conservative attack on the Obama administration&#8217;s handling of the interrogation and prosecution of would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), at this morning&#8217;s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates whether Abdulmutallab should be tried in a military commission instead of a federal court. Gates deferred, not wanting to be dragged in. McCain pressed him for a &#8220;candid&#8221; answer. &#8220;I think the attorney general is in the best position to determine where these people should be tried,&#8221; Gates replied. Attorney General Eric Holder, of course, opted to try Abdulmutallab in civilian court &#8212; and McCain, in frustration, said that Holder has &#8220;botched this very, very badly.&#8221;<span id=\"more-75493\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>McCain tried to get Gates to say that military interrogators should have interrogated Abdulmutallab, but Gates replied that &#8220;a\u00a0team of high-expertise FBI and other interrogators could be as effective at interrogating prisoners as anyone operating under the military field manual.&#8221; That&#8217;s a reference to the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, <a href=\"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/74332\/intel-chief-gives-obama-another-headache\">whom Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, erroneously told Congress last week was capable of interrogating Abdulmutallab, even though it isn&#8217;t operational yet<\/a>. McCain didn&#8217;t care about this fact, and got Gates to reiterate that the so-called HIG ought to have been on scene. He gave up after failing to get Gates to affirm that FBI interrogators didn&#8217;t have enough time to extract information from Abdulmutallab.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Carrying forward a conservative attack on the Obama administration&#8217;s handling of the interrogation and prosecution of would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), at this morning&#8217;s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates whether Abdulmutallab should be tried in a military commission instead of a federal court. Gates deferred, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}