shahzad. three attacks in the last three months, hassan, abdulmutallab and now shahzad. i was critical of the mutallab incident on christmas day. as far as this one, chris, the evidence isn t in yet as to what was available. based on what we have seen, i don t know if we could have stopped him, shahzad, before he got to times square or have to wait until all the dots out put out there. one criticism is what happened in the last hours of the investigation beginning sometime on monday afternoon, high administration sources were leaking out the most confidential classified information which compromised this investigation and put lives at risk and probably caused shahzad to escape and make it undetected to the airport. they were putting out information i never heard of in a case of this magnitude and it was coming from the administration and coming from washington and i know that troops on o the ground in new york were very concerned about
shahzad. three attacks in the last three months, hassan, abdulmutallab and now shahzad. i was critical of the mutallab incident on christmas day. as far as this one, chris, the evidence isn t in yet as to what was available. based on what we have seen, i don t know if we could have stopped him, shahzad, before he got to times square or have to wait until all the dots out put out there. one criticism is what happened in the last hours of the investigation beginning sometime on monday afternoon, high administration sources were leaking out the most confidential classified information which compromised this investigation and put lives at risk and probably caused shahzad to escape and make it undetected to the airport. they were putting out information i never heard of in a case of this magnitude and it was coming from the administration and coming from washington and i know that troops on o the ground in new york were very concerned about
shahzad. three attacks in the last three months, hassan, abdulmutallab and now shahzad. i was critical of the mutallab incident on christmas day. as far as this one, chris, the evidence isn t in yet as to what was available. based on what we have seen, i don t know if we could have stopped him, shahzad, before he got to times square or have to wait until all the dots out put out there. one criticism is what happened in the last hours of the investigation beginning sometime on monday afternoon, high administration sources were leaking out the most confidential classified information which compromised this investigation and put lives at risk and probably caused shahzad to escape and make it undetected to the airport. they were putting out information i never heard of in a case of this magnitude and it was coming from the administration and coming from washington and i know that troops on o the ground in new york were very concerned about
ongoing. the leading edge of this story, jane is whether this suspect had some direct ties to a terrorist organization in pakistan. we ve been reporting now for a couple of days that there was a growing body of evidence that there was some type of connection to a group in pakistan. a short time ago this morning a spokesman for the taliban in pakistan claim that they didn t know shahzad, that they had never trained him. in any event u.s. investigators are on their way over to pakistan to try to verify these claims. there is at least one documented case where the taliban in pakistan launched an attack outside of their region. that was suicide subway attempt in barcelona, spain. there is precedence for the taliban in pakistan for launching attacks outside of their region. jane: catherine herridge in d.c. she ll let us know if she
the christmas day bomber had contact with the same cleric. now shahzad has been in touch and trained in waziristan and has numerous lengths to foreign terrorist organizations as indicated by the arrest. the question you have to ask at this point i think is why haven t we been more successful on the front end in thwarting these attacks? you saw the president i think choose his words carefully. he sounded like he was going to say the attack had been thwarted. instead he changed it and said the attack failed. that is an important decision that will receive a lot of scrutiny going forward as we talk about how the administration is approaching these attempted terrorist attack and would be terrorists on the front end. a lot of props to the administration and law enforcement community for how they handled it after the fact. it s the beforehand i think deserves further scrutiny. bret: there is also the