In the midst of an ongoing policy debate over how much power the Bush administration should have to obtain surveillance powers, the White House has demonstrated once again that it simply can’t be trusted to handle national security information responsibly.
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.
In this case, SITE obtained the most recent Osama bin Laden video several days before it went public. Though the company is a for-profit enterprise, SITE contacted White House counsel Fred Fielding and Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center, with a link to a private SITE page containing the video and an English transcript. “Please understand the necessity for secrecy,” SITE’s founder Rita Katz wrote in her email. “We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations.”
That was at 10 am on Sept. 7. Within a few hours, it was on several television news outlets. By 3 pm, Fox News posted the video transcript with a reference to SITE, including 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 email to Leiter at 5 p.m.
The consequences of this matter.
Katz told the WaPo, “Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless.” The WaPo spoke to intelligence officials who conceded that the administration was wrong, and praised SITE for having been “tremendously helpful” in ferreting out al Qaeda secrets over time.
Remind me, who thinks the White House is trustworthy on national security issues?
It doesn’t get a lot of attention, but for all the talk about the Bush gang’s penchant for secrecy, these guys have remarkably loose lips. We are, after all, taking about a White House which authorized top staffers to disclose classified information to reporters about Iraq’s weapons capability in June and July 2003. For that matter, the same officials aren’t terribly good at keeping the identity of undercover CIA agents under wraps, and the Vice President doesn’t seem entirely clear on what he can and cannot declassify.
Moreover, it appears that the White House “authorized” leaks of classified information to reporter Bob Woodward, possibly undermining national security.
The details of the SITE leak are still a little vague, but one can’t help but wonder if perhaps the White House released the bin Laden video and transcript to serve a political purpose. After all, it was right around the time of a heated debate over FISA. Would the Bush gang undermine national security surveillance efforts against al Qaeda to score some political points? Given what we’ve seen, it’s hardly outside the realm of possibility.
For that matter, Igor Volsky reminds us what happened when the NYT ran with some al Qaeda-related leaks, prompting conservatives to accuse the newspaper of “treason.” Given the circumstances, the White House’s handling of the bin Laden video seems even more serious, and far more irresponsible.