A group of senior Republican senators are dialing up efforts to get answers from the White House and Eric Holder’s Justice Department on the decision to process the Christmas Day bomber as a criminal defendant. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and ranking Republicans from a number of committees with relevant jurisdiction sent a letter to Holder on Wednesday, demanding written answers and testimony on a number of national-security policy questions emerging from the failed attack.

Some excerpts:

“We remain deeply troubled that this paramount requirement of national security was ignored—or worse yet, not recognized—due to the administration’s preoccupation with reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights.
“Apparently there was little, if any, coordination among key components of the administration’s national security apparatus on how to treat Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Shockingly, the administration then made the hasty decision to treat him as a civilian defendant—including advising him of a right in a civilian law enforcement context not to cooperate—rather than as an intelligence resource to be thoroughly interrogated in order to obtain potentially life-saving information.
The congressional inquiries into why and how this could have happened left us and the American people with more questions than answers. Among these are:
–Why were key national security officials not consulted on the decision to treat Abdulmutallab, first and foremost, as a civilian criminal defendant?
–Why was this decision made so quickly, without first giving intelligence officials at least the opportunity to comment on it?
–Has the administration developed a protocol or standard operating procedure (SOP) for interrogating terrorists captured on American soil? If so, does the SOP give intelligence officials the opportunity to question terrorists?
–Why was such a modest amount of time, apparently less than an hour, devoted to questioning Abdulmutallab prior to telling him that he did not have to cooperate?
–Why was the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) not involved at all in his questioning? If it is because the HIG is not yet operational, why is the HIG still not ready for use, a year after the president announced the formation of the Special Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policies?