On the decision to treat Christmas bomber Umar Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant — and it is a drastic overstatement to call it a “decision” since that implies that actual thought went into it — Steve Hayes has a hair-raising post at The Standard’s blog on the testimony yesterday by four Obama national-security officials before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Bill Burck offered excellent thoughts on it here on the Corner yesterday, and I’ll be weighing in as well.

Meantime, as Steve points out, Sen. Jeff Sessions was just tremendous in his pointed questioning at the hearing. Senator Sessions released this statement afterwards:

I am deeply disturbed by the stunning revelations from today’s oversight hearings in the Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees. The decision to prosecute Umar Abdulmutallab in civilian court, which required him to be given a Miranda warning and access to a defense lawyer, may have cost us crucial intelligence about current and future plots against our country. Even more alarming, we learned today that these rash decisions were made without consulting key counter-terrorism officials in the administration, including the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair.
In his testimony today, Mr. Blair stated that the administration failed to deploy the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group that was put in place for this very purpose. We learned that the administration had no policy in place to determine whether Abdulmutallab would be treated as a civilian or as an unprivileged belligerent-that, in effect, these decisions were made “on the fly” without any meaningful consideration of the consequences. And we learned from FBI Director Mueller’s questioning that responsibility for the decision to switch gears from intelligence collection to criminal processing lies with an unnamed high-ranking official at the Department of Justice.
To understand the mistakes that were made and avoid them in the future, we must get to the bottom of exactly what decisions were made and by whom. Today’s Judiciary Committee hearing concluded with a bipartisan agreement that our intelligence officials must take immediate steps to put a clear policy in place to determine the course of action when a terrorist like Abdulmutallab is captured. It is truly alarming that, more than 8 years after 9/11, and on the heels of so many recently attempted strikes against our country, no such policy or directive is in place. Ultimately, I fear these failures are the product of efforts by the Obama Administration to ignore the fact that we are at war, as well as efforts to treat foreign terrorists as though they had the same rights as American citizens.
Director Mueller stated flatly that intelligence gathering stopped when Abdulmutallab was told he had the right to remain silent and to an attorney. By contrast, captured enemy combatants are not provided with these same privileges. While they do have important rights, they are available for interrogation and can be detained as long as the war continues.
Intelligence saves lives-but this administration’s wrongheaded quest to grant American criminal trials to foreign terrorists puts valuable intelligence out of reach.
Terrorists are at war with us whether we like it or not. Failing to recognize that reality will not serve us any better now than it did before 9/11. It will only increase the danger.