From WaPo:
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.
The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.
"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology.
Katz sent an email with link for the video to White House counsel Fred F. Fielding and Michael Leiter the No. 2 at the National Counterterrorism Center and asked that it not be distributed. Records show within minutes the video was being downloaded from SITE by government computers. By the afternoon several news networks had the transcript and....
A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.
Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.
For more on the controversy regarding Katz and the privatization of intelligence gathering see..."Private Jihad" from the New Yorker.
are you shocked? he just keeps doing the same mistakes he's made before.
georgie refuses to learn.
he never was FOR protecting america. just covering his ass.
Posted by: pansypoo | October 09, 2007 at 11:41
Can he even be touched by scandal any more than he already has? What more can come needs to come to light before the 32 percenters throw up their hands with the rest of the country? Somehow this story will go away next week. But we'll always have our links....
Posted by: e | October 09, 2007 at 12:51
I think y'all may be a little naive in thinking this leak to be a mistake of a junior member of staff. Look at the way Shrub has walled off the federal agencies from anyone on the inside speaking.
In short, nothing gets leaked from the WH without top level approval.
The question to be asked is why this was leaked. Did this make poppy Bush and his CIA buddies look bad ? Was there some other reason the Neocons wanted to shut her down ?
I don't know the answer. But I have a lot of questions.
Posted by: MapleStreet | October 09, 2007 at 13:15
I'm with Maple Street: This leak on its face makes no sense even under the theory that the administration does what it does purely to benefit itself or its friends. And yet it does appear to be a leak from, or approved by, a high-level official. WTF?
Posted by: Lex Alexander | October 09, 2007 at 13:39
what's in it for georgie? or cheeney?
Posted by: pansypoo | October 09, 2007 at 20:40