Ever since Nigerian Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, Republicans and conservatives have been attacking and politicizing the Obama administration’s response. Many have been whining that Abdulmutallab had not been properly interrogated and that valuable information has been lost. In an attempt to bash the Obama administration, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) today denigrated U.S. counterterrorism officials:

MCCONNELL: This was a person who was trying to blow a plane out of the air from Nigeria. It’s clearly a case for the military and for our intelligence people, not for the U.S. court system. What happened? He was given a 50 minute interrogation, probably Larry King has interrogated people longer and better than that. After which he was assigned a lawyer who told him to shut up. That is not the way to deal with someone in the war on terror.

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It seems McConnell would rather try to score political points by undermining the work American counterterror officials are doing in the field, particularly in Abdulmutallab’s case, where key information has actually been gleaned. In fact, reports surfaced this week that Abdulmutallab “has been cooperating for days” with the FBI. But this isn’t the first time a Republican has tried to attack the administration by insulting U.S. agents. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that getting information from Abdulmutallab was “blind luck.”

According to the Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, former FBI interrogator Jack Cloonan, who has interrogated al Qaeda members, said “What would you expect from Mitch McConnell? … They just don’t know what they’re talking about. They really don’t“:

“People keep talking about Mirandizing as if it’s a preventive measure, getting someone to shut up, but most critics have never been in position [to] have to Mirandize one,” Cloonan said. “It’s to keep pristine information you’ve already gotten and to have a prosecutable case. It’s not the end of an interview. … They’re gonna get all kinds of information from this guy.”

In fact, Abdulmutallab’s family members convinced him to provide information to U.S. authorities, an outcome that resulted from U.S. counterterror agents working in Africa “to gain an understanding of the subject.” “The intelligence gained has been disseminated throughout the intelligence community,” a senior administration official said. “The best way to get him to talk was working with his family.”

A local news station is reporting that a man posing as a federal officer abducted a pregnant immigrant, Cherrie Bell Hibbard, in California last month, took her through airport security, and put her on a plane back to the Philippines. Officials report that Gregory Raymond Denny drove Hibbard to a U.S. Border Patrol station claiming that he was going to deport her. Border patrol officials refused to take her into custody because they could find no warrant in her name. Denny then drove Hibbard to San Diego International Airport, where he escorted her through security to her gate, removed her handcuffs, and commanded her to get on the flight.

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Denny isn’t the first civilian to pose as a federal agent and exploit the the fears of the immigrant population. In Tennessee, a newborn infant was abducted from his immigrant mother by a woman posing as an immigration agent. The abductor threatened to arrest the mother and then attacked her with a knife before taking her four-day old baby. A Rhode Island man has been charged with posing as an immigration attorney and later as an immigration agent who threatened his “clients” with deportation after defaulting on his promises of legal aid. One of the most violent cases this year involved three anti-immigrant extremists who allegedly dressed up as law enforcement officers who forced their way into a home in rural Arizona where they are said to have murdered a Latino father and his 9-year-old daughter.

While federal authorities certainly aren’t to blame for these criminal acts, they are responsible for creating the environment of fear and intimidation in which these crimes are successfully committed. Federal agents have been known to break down doors and raid houses without the legal authority to do so. Parents have been separated from their children and immigrants have been apprehended and deported without ever having access to a telephone, visitations, or legal counsel.

Hibbard is married to a U.S. citizen and was in the process of obtaining her green card.

This week in Paris hundreds of world leaders and prominent global figures are attending the Global Zero summit to push for the elimination of nuclear weapons within the next 20 years. Conservatives frequently describe Obama’s vision of eliminating nuclear weapons as impractical and a byproduct of some absurd liberal utopianism. The Global Zero Summit has shown this defeatist narrative not just to be false but dangerous as well.

Queen Noor, a leading figure in the global zero effort, spoke with ThinkProgress about the summit. She noted that Global Zero “was launched in response to the growing threats of nuclear terrorism” and that “our commission has developed a 20 year end-to-end plan to eliminate nuclear weapons and to show how it could be done in 20 years.” Global Zero has put out a detailed plan (pdf) that lays out a step-by-step approach that includes “phased and verified reductions beginning with de-alerting (taking weapons off high alert) and making deep cuts to U.S. and Russian arsenals.” The plan also calls for a robust and universal verification and enforcement regime to prevent countries from cheating and to give countries confidence that other are upholding their end of the bargain.

Her Majesty notes that achieving this ambitious goal has become possible in recent years, due to “the fact that there seems to be an expanding consensus of public opinion and expert opinion around the world that zero is the only safe sustainable path and secure path for the future for our children and our children’s children.” Indeed, the summit has demonstrated that there is real and tangible support across the global political spectrum for the elimination nuclear weapons. For instance, Global Zero signatories include stalwart Republican national security officials from both the Reagan and Bush administration’s, including Reagan’s former Secretaries of State and Defense, George Schultz and Frank Carlucci and his National Security Adviser, Robert MacFarlane. These officials are certainly no wild-eyed idealists.

In response to what she would say to U.S. Senators that are contemplating opposing the President’s efforts to ratify a new START treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Queen Noor warned that such an approach would put the world on a dangerous path.

NOOR: We feel we are reaching a nuclear tipping point a point, beyond which the proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials can fall in to the hands of terrorists can not be reigned back in. I would say that you’re choosing between building together with the other nuclear states an environment of trust and confidence for a secure world without nuclear weapons or you are heading down the path of increased proliferation and the exponentionally increasing danger that nuclear materials will end up in the hands of non-state actors and terrorists, as well as the increasing danger of accidents taking place or miscalculations of which there have been many in the past.

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Desperate to deny the Obama administration any credit for the news that the failed Christmas bomber, Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, has been cooperating with investigators and providing intelligence, former Bush administration speechwriter and leading pro-torture advocate Marc Thiessen exclaims “That anyone can consider five weeks of utter silence from this high-value terrorist as a success is stunning.”

Abudulmutallab was supposed to be vaporized along with Northwest Flight 253. The moment al-Qaida learned that he had survived and was in U.S. government custody, they began taking countermeasures to cover his tracks.

Every hour, every day, every week that went by gave them precious time to close bank accounts, e-mail addresses, phone numbers he knew about, and shut down training camps, safe houses, and other intelligence leads he could have given us. Terrorists he knew about have been put into hiding, and other leads that were hot in the days immediately following his capture have since gone cold. The intelligence he possessed was perishable. Each moment that passed that he was not speaking meant lost counterterrorism opportunities.

For contrast, Thiessen offers up what he believes is the appropriate way to get intelligence from detainees, the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah:

Before enhanced interrogations, Abu Zubaydah provided what he thought was nominal information; after enhanced interrogations, Zubaydah “increased production” and provided intelligence that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh just as he was completing plans for the attack on Heathrow airport. In each of these cases, high value detainees were holding back vital intelligence until they underwent enhanced interrogations—after which they stopped resisting and told us what they knew.

That’s not entirely true. The CIA report (pdf) on detainee reporting that Thiessen relies on (and includes in the Appendix of his book, Courting Disaster) states on page 9: “We assess that each detainee very likely has information that he will not reveal,” even after the application of “enhanced” techniques that Thiessen favors. And, as Marcy Wheeler has documented, there exists no hard evidence that any intelligence gleaned from Zubaydah — through any methods — actually stopped imminent terrorist attacks.

But more significantly, what Thiessen leaves out of his article is that Abu Zubaydah — whose interrogation, remember, Thiessen claims as a triumph of intelligence-gathering — spent several weeks in the hospital before being interrogated. Abdulmuttalab, in contrast, was initially questioned by authorities before receiving medical care.

Thiessen didn’t leave it out of his book, though. On page 82 of Courting Disaster, he writes “When taken into custody, Zubaydah was in intense pain from life-threatening injuries he suffered during his capture.”

The CIA flew in a specialist from Johns Hopkins University who saved Zubaydah’s life. The agency then put off questioning for several weeks while he recovered.

So, understand: Every hour, every day, every week that went by gave Al Qaeda precious time to close bank accounts, e-mail addresses, phone numbers Zubaydah knew about, and shut down training camps, safe houses, and other intelligence leads Zubaydah could have given us. Terrorists he knew about have been put into hiding, and other leads that were hot in the days immediately following his capture have since gone cold. The intelligence he possessed was perishable. Yet Thiessen hails Zubaydah’s eventual interrogation as an intelligence bonanza, a textbook example of how to do it right.

Abdulmuttalab, on the other hand? Lost counterterrorism opportunity.