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Washington (CNN) - Top Republicans in Congress were told the suspect in the failed Christmas airline bombing was in FBI custody hours after his arrest, and none asked if he would be transferred to military custody, President Barack Obama's assistant on homeland security and counter-terrorism said Sunday.

Republican leaders have criticized the Obama administration for charging terrorism suspect Omar Farouk AbdulMutallab in a criminal court and reading him his Miranda rights instead of turning him over to military custody as an enemy combatant.

In a speech last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said: "Many Americans were troubled by the administration's response to the Christmas Day attack. And they're equally outraged by its decision to treat the Christmas Day bomber as a criminal defendant who deserved a lawyer, instead of a terrorist who could provide us with vital information to help stop new attacks."

However, John Brennan, the Obama assistant interviewed Sunday on the NBC program "Meet the Press," said none of the GOP leaders in Congress he called on Christmas night - including McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner - raised those issues then.

"I'm tiring of politicians using national security issues such as terrorism as a political football," Brennan said, adding: "They're unknowing of the facts and they're making charges and allegations that are not anchored in
reality."

The GOP leaders knew that "FBI custody means there's a process that you follow as far as Mirandizing and presenting him in front of a magistrate," Brennan said. "None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point. They didn't say, "Is he going into military custody? Is he going to be Mirandized?' "

Brennan noted that in the previous Republican administration of President George W. Bush, Democrats also tried to gain political advantage from security issues.

He urged politicians to refrain from politicizing such issues "rather than second-guessing what is happening on the ground."

AbdulMutallab allegedly attempted to detonate explosive material sewn into his underwear aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day.

Brennan said the the type of attack showed the effectiveness of U.S. efforts to deter large-scale attacks since the September 11, 2001, use of hijacked planes to crash into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, he said.

"It showed how difficult it is for al Qaeda to carry out large-scale attacks," Brennan said. Instead, the group now uses individual operatives to try to carry out smaller attacks, he said.

A Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last week was told by the nation's intelligence chiefs - Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta, FBI Director Robert Mueller and others - that
another attempted terror attack on the United States was "certain" in the next three to six months.

Brennan said al Qaeda has been a continuous threat to attack the United States for years, and that numerous previous attempts have been prevented.

"It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that al Qaeda is attempting to carry out an attack," Brennan said.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/02/07/obama-aide-says-republicans-playing-politics-with-terrorism/?hpt=T2&fbid=n92T3LZbnZe

"Brennan noted that in the previous Republican administration of President George W. Bush, Democrats also tried to gain political advantage from security issues."

Harry and Sam told me that the agency believed without the program the terrorists would have succeeded in striking our country again.

Harry put it bluntly: “It is the reason we have not had another 9/11.”


Their work was vital, but it was not easy. They took great care to stay within the confines of the law and to ensure the safety of those in their custody. For their efforts, they have been vilified as torturers by critics who know next to nothing about what went on at the “black sites” where they worked. In 2005, CIA director Porter Goss tapped two outside officials to conduct a review of the effectiveness of the CIA interrogation program: Gardner Peckham, the former national-security adviser to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and John Hamre, former deputy secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. Both spent several months at CIA headquarters studying the program and meeting with officials involved.

Peckham recalls having a long conversation late one night with one of the interrogators when he was conducting his review. This was “a very dedicated, capable guy who told me that he had been in with KSM one day, and KSM had basically said to him matter-of-factly, ‘If I ever get out of this hole, I’m going to kill you and your entire family.’ We were sitting there at nine o’clock at night or something, and he said to me, ‘You know, I work long days; this is hard. When I get down about it, I just think back to the film footage of the two people standing on the window of the World Trade Center on the 90-something floor, grasping each other by the hand and stepping out into space.’ He said, ‘I think of those two people, and I just go back to work.’”

Peckham says, “That really got to me. That level of dedication. These guys knew they were, in a lot of ways, limiting their futures by doing this kind of work, I think.They were risking something. But they knew a lot of other people were risking things too. And they knew it was important work, and I just have an enormous amount of respect for the people who are in this program. And I have such profound disrespect for those who ran for the tall grass when it started to become exposed, and even less regard for those who now seek to take political advantage of it.”