Missouri Senator Kit Bond, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee, called for the immediate halt of transferring Guantanamo Bay detainees back to Yemen and other countries where they can return to the battlefield as Al Qaeda affiliates. "If we don't stop the practice of releasing Gitmo detainees to Yemen or to other countries -- and some of them came through Yemen through Saudi Arabia -- we're asking for even more trouble. I think there ought to be an immediate halt put to releases from Gitmo," Bond said on Fox News Sunday. Bond admitted that the Bush administration made a "big mistake" transferring terrorists back to other countries. He hopes the Obama administration will not continue to commit the same mistake. Additionally, Bond strongly disagrees with the President's decision to charge the accused terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant. He believes we should have held him as an enemy combatant and tried him under the military commissions. "We had the ability in the previous administration to interrogate detainees following the laws and the Constitution, not torturing them, but getting information from them. This man, Abdulmutallab, probably has more insight into possible other recruits that Al Qaeda would be sending into the United States," Bond said. Bond warned, "This is war and its time we reacted to the war tactics." In response to Sunday's closure of the U.S. embassy in Yemen, Bond expressed concern that a shuttered diplomatic presence could hurt U.S. efforts to learn more about local Al Qaeda terror plots. Although he cautioned that he has not yet "seen all the classified information." The Senate Intelligence Committee will conduct hearings, scheduled to begin on January 21, on the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack to find out, as Bond says, "who screwed up." In regards to Homeland Secretary Napolitano's recent statement that "the system worked," Bond doesn't believe her misstatements are grounds to relieve her. However, he says "we need to find out what really happened."