Let's take it at face value.

It's been a month since AbdulMutallah proved himself an inept murderer-by-suicide.  Hell, he's not even as successful as Achmed the Dead Terrorist.  Achmed at least got the suicide part down, and scored a good acting job as a follow on.

A month in which Attorney General Holder's Justice Department facilitated AbdulMutallah's silence by allowing him to lawyer-up, and not get interrogated by intel specialists with the knowledge and experience to ask the right questions and to understand what they were hearing.

Um, here's a thought straight from US military training - if you are captured and have actionable intelligence, delay and obfuscate as long as you can, knowing that people will be assessing the damage and reacting accordingly.  Then, it's okay to start releasing what is now stale information rather than submit to having people nibble off your toes with heated horseshoe nail-benders.

Guess what?  As soon as al Qaeda knew that the A-man was in custody, they were evaluating what they believed he knew, and acting on that - moving people and hard assets around, abandoning safe houses, changing timetables and dropping plans while devising new ones.  They actually have a *lot* of experience at this.  Decades of it, in fact.  In environments where their enemies can be really pragmatic about intel-gathering, with little regards for comfort of the accused or the tender sensibilities of academics and trans-national elites.

One month later, the only people we're going to find are the stupid ones, and the plans we find are the plans they *want* us to find.  If we get anything else, that will just be pure dumb luck on our part combined with poor tradecraft on their part.  Emphasis on dumb.  We'll be wasting assets and time chasing chimeras and things that go bump in the night - which is exactly what they want us to do as they re-set and re-posture themselves.