Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The revelation that Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas Day underwear bomber, has been cooperating with authorities and providing valuable information “for days” demonstrates how irresponsible and ill-informed many conservatives have been in attacking President Obama’s handling of the incident. Using the tough and proven criminal system is producing results, while the Bush administration experiment with these conservatives’ preferred alternative -– the incommunicado detention of Jose Padilla — failed utterly to deliver reliable intelligence.

Conservatives have attacked the decision to charge Abdulmutallab in federal criminal court and give him access to an attorney. Critics like Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and Rudy Giuliani went on the attack from the get go, but they were recently joined by former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME).

Gen. Hayden took to the pages of the Washington Post on January 31 to claim “We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant the protections of our Constitution before we had adequately interrogated him.” Sen. Collins delivered the Republican weekly address the day before and castigated “the irresponsible, indeed dangerous, decision on Abdulmutallab’s interrogation.”

It’s terrible when the facts get in the way of a good story.

As we now know, far from being wrong, irresponsible, or dangerous, the path the Obama administration chose for the interrogation of Abdulmutallab is directly responsible for him cooperating with intelligence officials and giving up fresh and actionable intelligence. Abdulmutallab’s family worked with U.S. government officials to encourage him to cooperate, and so, according to them, “because they had complete trust in the US system of justice and believed that Umar Farouq would be treated fairly and appropriately.”

The intelligence gained from Abdulmutallab has been shared widely throughout the intelligence community — and has already produced results. On January 21, Malaysian counterterrorism authorities arrested 10 suspected terrorists tied to Abdulmutallab. The suspected cell was made up of mostly non-Malaysians including two Nigerians who were thought to be part of an international terrorist network.

So by the time Collins and Hayden attacked the Obama administration’s handling of Abdulmutallab’s interrogation it had already produced not just cooperation, but actionable intelligence that allowed an allied government to break up a suspected terrorist cell.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with their argument. Read more

President Obama’s counter-terrorism approach — especially his decision to publicly reject torture — received a huge vindication yesterday with the news that the FBI has been working with the family of the failed Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, and that “Abdulmuttalab has been cooperating with authorities and sharing intelligence since last Thursday”:

The agents and key family members arrived in back in the US on January 17th. The family members met with officials from the Justice Department and the FBI to plan a way forward.

“One of the principal reasons why his family came back is because they had complete trust in the US system of justice and believed that Umar Farouq would be treated fairly and appropriately,” the senior official said. “And that they would be as well.”

The FBI and Abdulmuttalab’s family approached the subject and “gained his cooperation. He has been cooperating for days,” the official said.

A key point here is that there is very little chance that Abdulmuttalab’s family would have agreed to cooperate with the U.S. government in getting Abdulmuttalab to talk if they suspected that he was in any danger of being tortured. This is a clear example of how President Obama’s bringing U.S. counter-terrorism practices back within the rule of law is making Americans safer.

A federal official told the New York Times that “the intelligence gained has been disseminated throughout the intelligence community,” and “the best way to get him to talk was working with his family.”

ABC also reported that “Abdulmuttalab was talking to FBI agents on Saturday, at the same time Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, issued the Republican response to the president’s weekly address, decrying Abdulmuttalab’s presence in the criminal justice system.”

It’s ironic that that Abdulmuttalab was providing information at the very moment conservatives were hyperventilating about the administration’s terrorism approach. The case also indicates that Obama’s decision to try the terrorist in criminal court has not served to cut off any information the U.S. could glean from Abdulmuttalab, as many critics have claimed. As CAP’s Ken Gude recently wrote, “The facts are clear: Criminal courts are a far tougher and more reliable forum for prosecuting terrorists than military commissions”:

The record of recent terrorism investigations demonstrates that interviews with terrorists who have attorneys have produced “an intelligence goldmine.”

False assumptions are driving the debate about the tools available to fight terrorism. President Obama needs to cut through the noise and use the tough and proven criminal justice system as a vital weapon in the fight against Al Qaeda.

Fortunately, it seems the president is doing just that.

A federal judge has rejected a U.S. government request to dismiss a lawsuit brought forth against them by Rennison Castillo, a U.S. citizen and military veteran who was mistakenly detained for seven months by immigration authorities. Castillo claims that Immigration and Customs (ICE) officials refused to act on information he provided at the time of his arrest to use military records to verify his status. He’s now seeking unspecified monetary damages and an apology.

However, government lawyers believe the suit lacks legal grounding, arguing that there is no “constitutional right” to a complete search of U.S. immigration files and no legal precedents to follow. Also, as the Seattle Weekly points out, Castillo has served time for an “array” of domestic violence charges and is “no angel.” Nonetheless, whether it’s explicitly spelled out in the Constitution or not, U.S. citizens shouldn’t have to worry about being locked up by immigration officials for seven months until they can scrounge up the money to hire an attorney who can prove their legal status. Reporter Raul A. Reyes further warns that, “if ICE believes you are in the country illegally, you can be arrested without a warrant and deported without a hearing.”

There may be no legal precedents, but there are certainly a multitude of incidents similar to the one Castillo endured. As of 2009, The Associated Press documented more than 55 cases of U.S. citizens being wrongfully detained by immigration agents over the past decade. Immigration lawyers argue there are actually hundreds of such cases. Castillo’s attorney and legal director of Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Matt Adams, hopes Castillo’s case will “send a message to the government: ‘Look, you have to be more cautious. We’re going to hold you accountable.’ ”

Castillo was born in Belize and moved to the U.S. at age seven. He joined the army in 1998 and became a naturalized citizen. Castillo’s problems were “compounded” by the fact that his immigration files listed two names and misspelled versions of his first and last name. He also lacked immediately family in the area to call for help.