of evidence how the bomb was made but they don t have a lot of evidence about who did this or why. the actual evidence that would lead to the person or persons involved. this suggests a slightly higher level of them what was first thought yesterday and if so, does that narrow down the net of potential suspects? it does. the black powder, the acetone, peroxide, you don t want to let it get went. absolutely right. you want to protect the explosives, the detonator. when this bomb went off, talked to a couple of people and their first reaction was what is happening to people coming back from afghanistan? they are terrified that american soldiers with four or five to worse will come back and be
he believes he s very much connected. here s his reaction. i ve been perfectly connected all the way along. it s a ridiculous charge. how could anyone be more hoosier? i have a farm out here i continue to work with my sons. i m in touch every week with everybody in the state. usually on the ground with visits. with our staff trying to meet almost every challenge of an individual hoosier or group. kelly, you also interviewed the governor, mitch daniels, who decided not to run for president. this is what he had to say about the possibility of losing dick lugar. i think we lose it s the nation loses. a reservoir of judgment, knowledge about the world. yeah, indiana would miss him, but i think the nation would too. kelly, let me just say, as someone who s covered foreign policy for decades and who first met dick lugar when he was the mayor of indianapolis and campaigning and giving a speech,
michael leiter knows a lot about being vigilant. he served as director of the national counterterrorism center and is an nbc terror analyst. michael, this last 24 hours sort of trying to go through the sourcing and you ve been in the middle of this kind of operation, so you know exactly what s going on. pete williams and a lot of our sources now reporting that the bomber himself, the reason why he s no longer a threat, is he was never a threat because he was a u.s. asset. he brought the bomb out and is now, of course, outside of washington being examined by fbi analysts. but we had actually infiltrated al qaeda. well, this is something we ve been trying to do for a long time. the reason that these issues remain so sensitive, of course, is key operatives, key insiders, are people who we want to continue to use. even though we had a success here, that doesn t mean that al
qaeda in the arabian peninsula is not trying to launch another attack. these methods of how we re collecting intelligence are really the crown jewels in terms of disrupting these plots. what can we learn from the bomb itself? we re told that the bomber, the master bomber, this may have been someone he trained. it may have been he himself, but he was upgrading the underwear bomb, working on something more advanced than the cartridge bombs that were put on those cargo planes going to philadelphia back in 2010. so what can we learn from looking at this plastic and figuring out how to guard against it? is the tsa going to have to redesign it s whole procedure? this bomb maker has been a target for several years because he s been so innovative. the underwear bomber, the cartridge bomb plot, which was really well-disguised on cargo jets. they re going to be looking at the components of this bomb, the
main charge, the detonator, the ignitor to know how effectively they might or might not get through airport screening. what i would stress is airport screening is one piece of this. no level of screening is going to be perfect. penetrating the organizations, screening travelers, screening visas. the last line of defense, trying to keep people off planes that might be carrying explosives or weapons of some sort. they were very eager to give credit to yemen. probably other intelligence agencies, such as the saudis. we know who has been targeted by this bomber in the past, including the saudi intelligence chief, the spy chief. at the same time, american counterterrorism has really stepped up quite a notch in our ability to go after al qaeda in the arabian peninsula. we have. really, this is very much a team sport. clearly, the united states, but