CNN reports that a terror suspect has been arrested who was in the process of building a pipe bomb. Deb Feyerick spoke with anchor Don Lemon Sunday night about how the suspect learned how to put the device together.

In an appearance on Fox’s American Newsroom, Mediaite Managing Editor Colby Hall discussed the suggestion that last night’s terror alert was part of some media manipulation by The White House. Hall dismissed the premise as “unfair,” and also wondered why the Obama administration has turned the War on Terror into a “real political strength,” but shows no sign of running on it.

NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel told NBC’s Jay Leno Wednesday night “it’s probably time to end the global war on terrorism.” Discussing Wednesday night’s speech by President Obama (which had not happened at the time the Tonight Show taped, though Engel had been briefed on the speech), Engel compared the 9/11 attack to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, describing one as the work of “19 guys with box cutters” and the other the work of a 24-man SEAL team:

Gen. James Clapper is the guy who’s tasked with coordinating everything the nation knows about terrorism and national security. So it’s perhaps somewhat less than comforting to watch Diane Sawyer‘s revealing interview with our nation’s top terror team and see Clapper appear to know less about the arrests of 12 people in London as part of a potential holiday terror plot than anybody who, say, watched Good Morning America that day as they got the kids ready for school.

The holiday week started Monday morning with a scare on ABC’s Good Morning America. Some of it was real, and some of it, well, wasn’t.

The GMA crew called in power player Brian Ross to report and provide analysis on the arrests of twelve people in the U.K.–considered the largest counterterrorism operation in months. Big story, and fittingly, GMA had its chief investigative correspondent on it.

For a little over a week, an eternity in news cycle dog years, the uproar over TSA pat-downs has dominated the media landscape like the bastard spawn of Rod Blagojevich, Sarah Palin, and Balloon Boy. Heading into the Thanksgiving weekend news dead zone, there seems little chance its momentum will slow, but The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz may be ushering in the most welcome phase of this story’s arc: the inevitable backlash against the TSA backlash.

While it took most of the media until Wolf Blitzer‘s interview with former president Bill Clinton to catch his warning that the Tea Party movement could lead to a new Oklahoma City bombing, Rush Limbaugh caught Clinton’s first reference to the bombing during his Center for American Progress speech– and he insists Clinton, among others, is “out to destroy Western civilization.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano may have given conservatives a great new t-shirt idea yesterday by claiming that the system “worked like clockwork” once the flight 253 incident had occurred (a disclaimer that rendered the statement meaningless), but there may actually be some truth to the notion that the system worked. Napolitano’s statement (since “clarified”) was a wrongheaded attempt at reassurance, it seems that a whole bunch of other people have an interest in making you as scared as possible.

The biggest question to come from Thursday’s thwarted terrorist attack is how did someone on a watch list manage to get on a plane? This explanation from a senior administration official, via Politico, may go some ways to answering that question: There’s a lot of bureaucracy involved.

Where to point the finger over Thursday’s averted terror attack on Northwest Flight 253? How much responsibility for this falls on President Obama? Perhaps this is a good time to point out Obama has been in office three and a half months longer that George W. Bush was when September 11 occurred. So who inherited what?

Hot on the heels of Janet Napolitano‘s “The system worked like clockwork” appearance on This Week, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs faced questions from Jake Tapper, who got to the heart of the issue. If the flight 253 suspect was on a watch list, who was watching him? Gibbs’ response was equally on target.

Another incident has been reported on Northwest Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, CNN and BNO News are reporting. Details are still coming in, but here’s the information that’s available thus far, as gleaned from Twitter.

Jake Tapper interviewed DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on ABC’s This Week, giving an early indicator of what the administration’s narrative on Flight 523 will be. Caught between the need to reassure a jumpy public, political opponents drooling at the chance to score points, and an unwillingness to tip our hand to those who would do us harm, Napolitano had her work cut out for her. Even given those factors, the Secretary’s overarching message was tone deaf, to say the least.