We now know something truly horrifying – Americans could very well die in massive numbers in the coming 6 months:

There is no doubt of a coming attack from in the responses of these national intelligence leaders. There is not a 50% chance or a 75% chance or a 95% chance. 100%. If this was a diagnosis on the odds of surviving a disease it is like being told the disease will be 100% fatal. For some of us at least that is now apparently the case.

The weapons have been launched and are on their way –  but they are invisible to us. They are slow moving (being human after all) and will be weaving their way towards us for some time. They could strike tomorrow or 6 months from now. They may not all strike at once. But they are coming.

While the first weapon failed on Christmas Day, our enemies have had time to correct the fault, change their deployment plans and up their odds of success. It was a stroke of wild luck that allowed the Christmas Day Bombing over the skies of Detroit to fail. It was a rare opportunity to avoid massive disaster on the flimsiest of conditions.

This is the message conveyed on Capitol Hill the other day.

Is there someone who could have reduced the odds of attack? Is there someone who had the power to take that wisp of luck in Detroit and exploit it to our advantage? Was there a time when, if we acted, the chance of attack would have been much lower than 100%?

Yes there was. The man at the center of this situation is Attorney General Eric Holder, and he failed to act correctly and take steps to save lives (instead he salved his ego). His actions are probably why the probability of attack on America went from medium-high to certain.

Holder has just broken weeks of silence regarding whose asinine decision it was to Mirandize and lawyer up an enemy combatant. A combatant who was out of uniform and committing a internationally defined illegal act of war:

“I made the decision to charge Mr. Abdulmutallab with federal crimes, and to seek his detention in connection with those charges, with the knowledge of, and with no objection from, all other relevant departments of the government,” Holder says in a letter addressed to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other senators who have sought testimony from Holder on the treatment of Abdulmutallab.

Holder’s shaky fig leaf of a cover because ‘no objections’ were raised in another case of lying to the public. That is is because Holder admits waiting until January 5th to talk to the other relevant departments, at which time the damage was done and a week past, it was too late to object. And even if the Obamabots sat their in dumbfounded silence, too scared to raise the required objections, that is no excuse for Holder’s ideological driven incompetence.

As I noted yesterday, the fact we let weeks go by before flying to Africa to pick up some honorable family members of the bomber to convince him to start talking also gave al Qaeda weeks to go to their “Plan B”. They have all run to ground, changed code words, put their weapons onto new targets. The information now bubbling from Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab is now of little use, as Stephen Hayes noted yesterday:

One of the greatest concerns about the handling of Abdulmutallab is that FBI interrogators — in their initial 50 minute interview —  questioned him without the benefit of the information the U.S. intelligence community had collected on him in the six months prior to his attack. Mueller confirmed this, saying, “we did not have much information at 3:30,” when Abdulmutallab was initially questioned. Mueller testified that they had gathered more information on Abdulmutallab to use in his second interrogation. But when the “clean team” met with Abdulmutallab some five hours later to read him his rights, he stopped talking. So despite the fact that the intelligence community had compiled a dossier on Abdulmutallab — which included information from his father and from intercepts — none of that information was used to question him for five weeks after he was detained.

Byron York recapped the serial lies that were spouted by this administration over the last 5 weeks as they scrambled to work around Holder’s deadly mistake and get the mad Jihadi bomber to talk again:

Ever since the public learned that authorities had just 50 minutes to question Abdulmutallab before he was read his Miranda rights and refused to answer any further questions, the Obama administration has claimed that it had, during that brief interrogation, gotten all the information that was possible to be gained from Abdulmutallab. On Fox News Sunday January 24, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that “FBI interrogators believe they got valuable intelligence and were able to get all that they could out of him.” When host Chris Wallace asked, “All they could?” Gibbs answered, “Yeah.”

On January 31, top White House adviser David Axelrod told Meet the Press that Abdulmutallab “has given very valuable information to the government about activities in Yemen and some of his experiences there.” To emphasize the point, Axelrod said, “We have not lost anything as a result of how his case has been handled.”

So just a few days ago the Obama administration claimed that Abdulmutallab had given up everything he knows. Now, they claim he is giving them fresh, useful intelligence.

Emphasis mine – and the answer is ignorantly wrong. We lost time, precious little time.

Even the DNI is now sending signals politics has polluted our national security. Unlike the faked FISA-NSA hysteria the NY Times ran with, this is real and has turned deadly. By making public their new data, the administration simply tipped their hand once again, giving the terrorists another chance to succeed. This is not speculation, it is what was testified to in the Senate.

The incompetence of Holder’s ideological madness was compounded with this clear record of trying to cover up Holder’s ideological madness. Clearly this White House has no clue what it is doing, even the cover up looks amateurish and crude. It even has gone so far as to leak details of what they do know or how they are working behind the scenes get more information to prove they are taking action. In the process they keep exposing their hand to those silent and invisible enemies coming our way.

There was a time when the probability of attack after Christmas Day was not 100% – as it stands now. There was a time when all the other attacks were exposed. It was a very brief window. There were a few hours or days when the probability of a follow on attack, which would be more successful than the failed initial attempt, was possibly quite low – maybe less than 50%. And actions to take out these other weapons could have reduced it to zero.

That is the missed question from Congress: knowing what we know now (that wonderfully penetrating 20-20 hindsight), what was the probability of attack on the US the day after Christmas with that same knowledge we just received from the bomber?

The fact is the administration this week admitted they allowed another terrorist attack to get through. Just because it has not happened yet does not mean it is not coming. According to the very same administration it is coming and they cannot stop it. They cannot stop it because they allowed Holder and other ideologues like him to run lose unchecked. Even the President can be called out by his people – this is a democracy. But it takes courage to do the right thing, it takes sacrifice and conviction. None of that is on parade right now.

We have  had a Clear and Present Danger facing us for decades, which just about all of us finally woke up to and recognized on 9/11/01. There is no ignorance excuse available anymore.

President Obama better hope these career experts are wrong. Because if they are not wrong, and Americans do die, he and Holder will be brought to justice. They have had plenty of warnings about the stakes involved with their crazy, liberal kid-gloves approach for terrorists. If this incompetent string of actions (and equally abysmal coverup attempts) result in a successful attack it will be the clearest case of High Crimes ever seen in this nation’s history.

Update: More on this subject over at Hot Air with Allahpundit.

Update: Even CBS News is not impressed.

Tags: Christmas Day Bombing, Eric Holder, President Obama, War On Terror