I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.
I was reading the Washington Post this morning, about how we'd found this Al Qaeda operative and were using him as a mole to send encoded emails to other Al Qaeda operatives. The thing is, the Post story mentioned the guy by name. At the time I thought, that's kind of stupid - we aren't going to be using that mole any more.
Well, Reuters just confirmed my worst fears. The Bush administration just blew the spy's cover, "setting back the war on terror," the story notes. Why did Bush blow the guy's cover? Because Bush was trying to prove that his administration really IS the one to vote for this fall? You decide.
According to the article, the "successful" British raids on suspected Al Qaeda operatives the Bushies trumpeted this past week were in fact panicked last-minute raids, attempting to corner these guys before they fled because the Bushies' disclosure had alerted the Al Qaeda operatives to the fact that we knew who they were.
A day later, Britain hastily rounded up terrorism suspects, some of whom are believed to have been in contact with Khan while he was under cover. Washington has portrayed those arrests as a major success, saying one of the suspects, named Abu Musa al-Hindi or Abu Eissa al-Hindi, was a senior al Qaeda figure.
A day later, Britain hastily rounded up terrorism suspects, some of whom are believed to have been in contact with Khan while he was under cover. Washington has portrayed those arrests as a major success, saying one of the suspects, named Abu Musa al-Hindi or Abu Eissa al-Hindi, was a senior al Qaeda figure.Not surprisingly, security experts that Reuters contacted totally freaked out over what the Bush administration has just done.
But British police have acknowledged the raids were carried out in a rush. Suspects were dragged out of shops in daylight and caught in a high speed car chase, instead of the usual procedure of catching them at home in the early morning while they can offer less resistance.
Security experts contacted by Reuters said they were shocked by the revelations that the source whose information led to the alert was identified within days, and that U.S. officials had confirmed his name.The article continues, noting that Bush just destroyed months and years of work in the war on terror:
"The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse," said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's Defense publications. "You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?
"It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It's not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it's on the front pages every time there's a development, is it?"
"Running agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months and years of work, which may be difficult to recover."
Rolf Tophoven, head of the Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy in Essen, Germany, said allowing Khan's name to become public was "very unclever."
"If it is correct, then I would say its another debacle of the American intelligence community. Maybe other serious sources could have been detected or guys could have been captured in the future" if Khan's identity had been protected, he said....
Home Secretary David Blunkett, responsible for Britain's anti-terrorism policy, said in a statement on Friday there was "a difference between alerting the public to a specific threat and alarming people unnecessarily by passing on information indiscriminately."
