Yesterday, several news outlets reported that top Bush administration officials received a key tip about Osama bin Laden’s latest video, before al Qaeda even released it, only to leak the sensitive information to the media within a few hours. SITE, a private company, contacted White House counsel Fred Fielding and Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center, with the information, along with a plea: “Please understand the necessity for secrecy. We ask you not to distribute … [as] it could harm our investigations.”
Within a few hours, it was on several television news outlets. SITE’s founder told the WaPo, “Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless.”
Yesterday, the White House did its best to spin its latest mishandling of sensitive national security information. (via DOK)
The White House has come up with a new euphemism for leaks.
Press Secretary Dana Perino said intelligence agencies would be responsible for investigating what she described as any “process problem” in the alleged disclosure of sensitive information from a tip the administration received in advance of Osama bin Laden’s video message last month.
“Process problem.” Cute. The White House, which abhors leaks unless they’re self-serving, mishandled a video of a top terrorist target, but the problem was with the “process,” not incompetent officials who apparently just ruined an intelligence-gathering operation.
Perino added that the president and his administration feels “strongly about leaks about classified information and intelligence,” adding, “”We don’t think that it serves the American people well.” If the White House didn’t leak classified information so frequently, Perino’s claim wouldn’t sound so silly.
What’s more, this is a story that might stick around for a while.
The WaPo reported today:
U.S. intelligence officials will investigate allegations that the government improperly leaked a secretly obtained Osama bin Laden video, alerting al-Qaeda to a security gap in the terrorist group’s internal communications network that it was able to shut, an intelligence spokesman said yesterday.
Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said officials are looking into the leak allegation by the SITE Intelligence Group, which passed the video on to the White House and the director of national intelligence’s office before its leak.
“At this point, we don’t think there was a leak from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence or the National Counterterrorism Center,” Feinstein said.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, responding to a description of the leak in yesterday’s editions of The Washington Post, told reporters that “this was a cause of concern that the information was leaked. And I would have to refer to the DNI’s office in regards to any possible investigation into that leak.”
Here’s the thing: like the Plame leak, when the White House outed a covert CIA official during a war, news outlets know who did the leaking. Someone in the administration called up a bunch of newsrooms on Sept. 7, and started sharing the video and the transcript.
White House officials are now saying that the leak didn’t come from them, the DNI’s office, or the NCC. Here’s a crazy idea: can reporters tell us if that’s true?