Underwear bomber questioned 50 minutes by FBI - then granted lawyer

The White House is not disputing a report that FBI agents questioned accused Northwest Airlines bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for just 50 minutes before deciding to grant him the right to remain silent and provide him with a court-appointed lawyer -- a decision that led Abdulmutallab to stop talking and provide no more information.

The news came in an Associated Press reconstruction of Abdulmutallab's first hours in custody. The AP reported that Abdulmutallab "repeatedly made incriminating statements" to U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who originally took him into custody. Then Abdulmutallab made more statements to doctors who were treating him for burns and other injuries. Only later did FBI agents interview him -- a session that lasted, according to the Associated Press, for "about 50 minutes." Before beginning the questioning, the AP continues, "the FBI agents decided not to give him his Miranda warnings informing him of his right to remain silent" -- apparently relying on an exception to Miranda that allows questioning about imminent threats.

After that, Abdulmutallab went into surgery. It was four hours before he was available for more questioning. By that time, the Justice Department in Washington had intervened. A new set of agents read Abdulmutallab the Miranda warning, telling him he had the right to remain silent -- and thereafter, Abdulmutallab remained silent.

The intervention by Holder has now taken on an entirely new meaning. The fact that FBI agents were in place and questioning the terrorist without mirandizing him proves that the Attorney General was determined to treat him as a criminal all along.

In a Fox News Sunday interview, press spokesman Robert Gibbs did what he does best - lie and lie again:

"Let me just press one last question," Wallace said. "You really don't think that if you'd interrogated him longer that you might have gotten more information, since we now know that Al Qaeda in Yemen -- "

"Well, FBI interrogators believe they got valuable intelligence and were able to get all that they could out of him," Gibbs said.

"All they could?" Wallace asked.

"Yeah," Gibbs said.

Bottom line: Gibbs did not dispute that the FBI interviewed Abdulmutallab for just 50 minutes. But Gibbs maintained that agents learned everything that was possible to learn from the accused terrorist, who was trained by, and presumably knew about, the activities of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. If the agents learned everything that was possible to learn from Abdulmutallab in just 50 minutes, it was likely a world record of interrogation.

Someone is going to have to sort this thing out. We already knew there were no protocols in place to handle the terrorist. Now we see that if the underwear bomber had been part of a larger plot, we never would have known about it because Holder stupidly ordered the terrorist to be treated as a common criminal.

We were lucky there. How long can our luck hold out with these clowns running things?