Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

Firm Says Administration's Handling of Video Ruined Its Spying Efforts

By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, October 9, 2007; Page A01

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

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How amazing that we Hoover up any and all street urchins from Arab countries and hold them without charge for years on the basis that they are irreplaceable threat indicators--

. . . They (government spokesmen) also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Aha! Individuals in the right place with all these issues and yet we pull innocent German and Canadian citizens off the streets and torture them because, presumably, we have no one in the right place to deal with that issue.

I would love to see a single case where this bungling, incompetent administration did a single thing without screwup in the past seven years.

Just one instance.

* For more in-depth articles by Jim on Middle East, check out Opinion-Columns.com