we're back with mark mckinnon and susan page with more on the fix. let's listen to allen quist in minnesota. >> i like you have seen that our country is being destroyed. i mean, this is every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom. this is our fight. and this is our time. this is it. terrorism, yes. that's not the big battle. the big battle is in d.c. with the radicals, they're not liberals, they're radicals. obama, pelosi, walsh. they're not liberals, they're radicals. they are destroying our country. >> wow! you know, i think liberal is an okay word. this guy says liberal is not bad enough for obama. what do you think, mark mckinnon. >> i think you ought to be running for the border. >> he obviously thinks this is going to sell, the hard right, democrats are a bunch of radicals and worse than terrorists, what a statement. >> i think we're pushing extremes to the utter extreme, and we keep lowering the bar. i think a lot of this is about being as outrageous as you can to get attention from the media, here we are providing it. but hopefully over the long haul, they'll pay the penalty at the place where it counts in the voting booth. >> i'm familiar with conservative republicans in the northeast. they're reasonable people. they must think this guy's a barn burner? >> well, welcome to youtube. i mean, he may not have thought that this affair he was talking to in minnesota was going to get this kind of attention. good news for tim walsh. it's pretty liberal for this historical -- >> he calls them a radical. >> you could do worse with an opponent. >> this is the crazy stuff that goes on the middle east. >> everybody has to go crazy. it's tribalism run amok. thank you, everyone. join us tomorrow night at 5:00 and 7:00 eastern. "countdown" with keith olbermann starts right now. which of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow? the president confirms somebody knew it, not enough somebodies said it. >> it now turns out that our intelligence community knew of other red flags that al qaeda in the arabian peninsula sought to strike not only united states targets in yemen, but the united states itself. >> richard wolffe joins us with more on the investigation. president bush created the system, still does not work. the closing of gitmo will not be delayed for a startling reason. >> we will close guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a recruiting tool for al qaeda. that was the explicit rational for the formation of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula. tonight's comment on health care reform. a comment from the chairman of the republican national committee. brit hume and the threat to convert tiger woods to christianity. >> you speak the name jesus christ, and i don't mean to make a pun here, but all hell breaks loose. joan rivers a threat to airport security? their presence close to porn, and the majority of fox's viewers trailer trash. >> tomorrow on glenn beck, a very special book burning. all the news and commentary now on "countdown." >> get it on. good evening from new york, president obama met at the white house this afternoon with 20 top officials representing the entire american security and intelligence apparatus. the meeting's goal to assess how a 23-year-old nigerian muslim could bring a bomb on board a u.s.-bound plane in yemen, even though american officials knew his father feared he had become radicalized. al qaeda's offshoot in yemen was preparing a nigerian man for an attack on america. early this evening, mr. obama declared flatley the system had failed. the u.s. had all the intelligence it needed to prevent abdulmutallab from getting on a jet headed for this country. that is not acceptable and will not be tolerated during the closed door meeting according to the white house, mr. obama went further and said, "this was a screwup that could have been disastrous, we dodged a bullet, but just barely. it was averted by brave individuals, not because the system worked. and that is not acceptable. while there will be a tendency for finger pointing, i will not tolerate it. he was briefed by robert muller on the bombing attempt investigation. briefed by attorney general eric holder on the state of the prosecution, expected to begin this month. briefed by homeland security secretary napolitano on the review of airport screening measures. and briefed by john brennan on the review of u.s. terror watch lists and how the intelligence on this case was handled or mishandled. mr. obama did not identify who screwed up, nor did he say whether anything will happen to them. >> the u.s. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot, and personally disrupt the christmas day attack. but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list. in other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had. the information was there, agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it, and our professionals were trained to look for it. and to bring it all together. now, i will accept that intelligence by its nature isn't perfect. but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. that's not acceptable. and i will not tolerate it. >> on the same day, his spokesperson confirmed the suspect has given the fbi actionable intelligence. prior u.s. intelligence on the figure previously known as the nigerian, included the fact that he was planning an attack specifically on the u.s. mr. obama also revealed something about the role of guantanamo bay in all this. former vice president cheney argues the failed attack shows gitmo should not be closed. we know two leaders behind the attack, al qaeda in the arabian peninsula was allowed to create the group because mr. cheney and mr. bush set them free from guantanamo. the creation of guantanamo created last month's attack. >> we will close guantanamo bay, which has become a recruiting tool for al qaeda. that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al qaeda in the arabian peninsula. >> close to half of the detainees at guantanamo are yemenis, but they will not be sent back. the impoverished nation has only in the past year begun to get serious about al qaeda with thousands of yemeni troops battling al okayed did just this week. yemen reporting the death of two al qaeda members. the u.s. has closed the embassy there, and the embassy reopening today. with us again tonight richard wolffe, the author of "renegade the making of a president." >> good evening. >> you said last evening possibly critical information was not passed on. can you explain some more clear nature of the scenario they were looking at, and why it remained on the radar? >> well, for some, for the president to effectively close the door, telling everyone he called it, a giant screw up. in that sense it's closer to the mixup rather than the conspiracy theory i mentioned yesterday. i wasn't talking about some online commentators have thought a political plot by allowing civilians to die. this really gets to the heart of intent versus pure accident. intent can be nonmalicious, it can be a failure to cooperate. it can be a lack of confidence in the system, which the president has also concluded that's where he's at. and one thing that the president didn't refer to today, which is very revealing, was what he picked out first of all in hawaii, the story about abdulmutallab's father going to the cia in nigeria and telling them about the radicalization of his son, and the fears about his son. that information in the early reports was not shared. the president confirmed it was not shared. the cia and other reports compiled a dossier on abdulmutallab which was not shared. he doesn't want this blame game any more. the president understands that can be corrosive, he want thos look at how things can be fixed rather than the why they were broken in this case. >> lack of confidence in the system, and the response to it being, don't put the information in the system. it sounds like something we had in football the other day, the player who refused to play, so the team announced it was benching him. how do you protect the value of your own intelligence networks by not putting the information into a system, no matter how broken that system might be? >> well, ultimately, you don't, actually protect the value, of course, because people cannot act on it, and intelligence cannot be acted on is not useful in terms of disrupting these plots. so if you stand back and look at it like that, look at it from the end point, of course, it doesn't make any sense. but this is a system that the administration has inherited, and look, the way they're talking about it tells you a lot. you would not have heard president bush saying that the edifus established after 9/11 could be lacking in production. it's a blame game on your own house, and they seem to think that that's effective. clearly the president has increased the pressure on everyone. we in the media, of course, love the blame game. it's insightful for us, it's a great story. the president made it very clear, this is going to be about moving forward, not looking back. >> but, mr. obama said in that public statement earlier this evening, there will be accountability but no finger pointing. how do you know who to hold accountable if nobody's pointing out who they are, finger or otherwise. and the white house said all relevant agencies took responsibility. much as you said there, but how do you take responsibility if you're not doing so in public but rather in private? >> you don't, and this is is the same set of problems the bush administration faced, how open can you be? here you have a president who is admitting fault. he doesn't mind as president bush would have minded the terrorists find out all sorts of weaknesses here. the weaknesses are exposed because this guy broke through every piece of the system, and every type of intelligence was out there. it won't be one big fell swoop and done big structural overhaul. >> as always, thanks for your time tonight, richard. >> thank you, keith. time now to bring in howard fineman senior washington correspondent, columnist for "newsweek" magazine. happy new year. >> happy new year, keith. >> does today put any end to a political attack? does is suggest president obama is utterly soft on terror? >> of course not. this is 2010, but it could have been any time in the last 40 years as far as the republican party is concerned. what the republicans are focusing on right now, both sarah palin and michael steele westbound doing it this afternoon and this evening, is the notion that abdulmutallab will be tried in an american court as though that were some sign of weakness. the fact is, the bush administration did exactly the same thing with the shoe bomber, richard reid, did the same thing with jose padilla. it's been a proven and very effective way of not only getting information, but getting justice. that hasn't stopped as i said, either steele or palin, and they're probably as representative figures as can you get. and they're going to go after president obama because this is what republicans do, and it's what they've done arguably since at least 1972, if not 1966. >> bill o'reilly just said that al qaeda thugs have no rights and should be shot on sight. if somebody says, hey, bill o'reilly is an al qaeda thug, unfortunately he never gets to say, no, i'm not. i was just throwing in the reminder of the flaw in that logic. let's get to the political impact. mr. obama was startling when he said this prison camp that was created by bush and cheney at gitmo was one of the explicit rationales for the creation of that group in the arabian peninsula, the yemeni group we're talking about. is that not a major headline here, the republican initiative that abandon american principles -- more or less main lines to a suicide bomber on an airplane? it is almost cause and effect. >> that kind of information, and that kind of connecting the dots by president obama is precisely what he was hired for by the american people, keith. barack obama's campaign, he did not present himself as a pacifist. he said there were wars that were necessary, but he said, i'll be smart as well as tough. and that's sort of what he's saying there. what matters among other things is how we're viewed by the rest of the world, especially the muslim world, and it's stupid not to believe that, and not to follow that for the sake of our own security as a country. where the president has fallen into problem here, is not that he's weak. i mean, he can defend that business about being soft on defenses, that's bologna. he has to be smart. if he's politically vulnerable here, keith, it's that the administration doesn't look smart in the way it handled the christmas events. the lack of coordination leading up to it. that's what he's got to address here. >> after 9/11, the shoe bomber, the anthrax mailings, the failure to capture bin ladin or the people from the uss cole, mr. bush found nobody, and held nobody accountable. why did nobody care then, but everyone seems to care about that now? >> well, that's a very good question. and i would say one reason is that the republicans are much better at sticking together and keeping their mouths shut as scooter libby showed than the democrats, the democrats and their media critics sometimes like to form a circle and fire at each other. republicans are pretty good at staying disciplined. in the former case of the cia, it was outrageous what happened with george tenet. he said it was a slam dunk, mr., that saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction. he had no such thing, he got a medal of freedom, instead. >> the full quote from tenet, mr. president, it's a slam dunk in our own basket. he left that second part out. [ laughter ] >> i'm sorry, i apologize for making a joke about that. but that's what it is like sometimes. >> thank you, keith. some of the democrats counter terrorism presented thusly, as to the conservative ideas, a separate check-in line at the airport to scrutinize anybody with the name abdul, ahmed or mohammed. see if you can spot the flaw in that genius. so you're good to go in the morning. you're late. alka-seltzer brings you back. - kids: cup-cakes! cup-cakes! cup-ccup-cakes!-cakes! - come on. cup-- re-do! re-do! ( stove dings ) cup-cakes! cup-cakes! cup-cakes! ( cheering ) announcer: relax. pam helps you pull it off. this is the second day of our new feature. a pair of short comments. there is nothing that racists in this country like better than to tell themselves they're not being racist. it's a coincidence that it's a black president destroying this country. when in fact he has done very little that a white republican president would not have done. the christmas day terror attempt is calling for a special profiling of people like umar farouk abdulmutallab. if you are an 18 to 28-year-old muslim man, you should be strip searched so says tom mcinerney, a frightened ex-general who works for fox. racially profile all muslims, a frightened ex-national guards man who works in congress. and at the airports, there should be a separate line to scrutinize anybody with the name abdul, ahmed or mohammed. here's a question to mr. gallagher and congressman king and lieutenant-general mcinerney. it's a two-word question and it's in the form of a name. richard reid? there's one special flaw in your plan, what would you do with everybody, the suspect and the pius elite named abdul, ahmed or mohammed suddenly changed his name to mike gallagher? i'm amanda. tom. james. nice job on the brochures and letterhead. louis, keep up the good work with our shipments. it's -- it's peter. great job, everybody! that's a closet. you know what, guys? take the afternoon off! we can't. that is why i hired you. world's proudest boss. [ male announcer ] we understand. you can never have too much help. fedex office. the chairman of the rnc says his party will not take back the house this year, and may not even be ready to do so. and the last time the party was in control, it got drunk with power. so while his honesty and dignity numbers just shot through the roof, his shelf life in that job would be described as tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. all this comes as steele was promoting his book, "how to defeat the obama agenda." when steele got himself into a lather about nice pickups, hannity asked if steele thought the party could take back the house. listen carefully as steele answers not this year, before trying not very successfully to soften the answer. >> do you think you could take over the house? >> not this year. and honestly -- >> you don't think so? >> i don't know yet, because i don't know who all the candidates -- we have some vacancies to be filled. if we do that, are we ready? >> are you? >> are we ready? >> answer your own question, are you ready? >> i don't know, and that's what i'm assessing and evaluating now. the candidates that are looking to run, have to be anchored in these principles, they have to understand -- >> i'm agreeing with what you're saying -- >> they have to understand these steps, they don't, they'll get to washington and they'll start drinking that potomac river water and get drunk with power. >> chris kofinas joins us now. michael steele finally says something you and i can agree with? >> it's a new year's miracle, not that he became a democrat, that he's actually telling the truth for once. republicans are not going to win back the house, and the republicans did screw up when they controlled congress, and when george bush was in congress for eight years. the problem with his answers, in terms of the logic, how he got there. i mean, he believes as he pointed out in that segment, he believes it was because they weren't true to their conservative principles. in the problem that michael steele and others in the republican party don't seem to want or embrace, those principals that got them in trouble, and they seem to keep wanting to put this square hole in a round peg. and they don't understand the country doesn't believe in those principles, especially when we saw through their governing, it doesn't work. they don't make the country better. >> one republican said the republican party does have a chance to take back the house this year. this is the ultimate steele/cage death match, steele yesterday versus steele today. >> the evolution of the republican civil war has taken a turn. we've gone from candidates fighting other candidates to michael steele fighting michael steele. i mean, this is where the first michael steele is right, in contrast to the second michael steele and the nrcc. the republican why the republicans won't win back the house is for three reasons, they don't have a message. whatever message they had, it just doesn't work. being negative and saying no is not the way you're going to win over voters. the second thing is money, the d dccc has done a terrific job of raising money, the nrcc has not. the third thing, this continuing civil war between the chairman himself as well as within the republican party. >> there's one other thing in here, i guess it doesn't make too much of a difference if you're the party of the -- well, i think that will be clear once i read the quote. our platform is one of the best political documents that's worked in the last 25 years, honest engine on that. it's just open mouth, insert foot, or what? >> you know, most of us have that internal vice that says don't say things, they get you in trouble. michael steele seems to have that internal voice that says things that get him into trouble. as a chairman, he doesn't seem to understand the functions to help his party not hurt his party. >> another point here, an actual breaking news of