It’s amazing that there is an apparent leak from the White House that may have just closed a very important back end to al Qaeda. If you have been in a cocoon for the past 24 hours, here is the run down:
A small, privately run intelligence analysis company says that a Bush administration leak has ruined years of clandestine work to find and exploit al Qaeda secrets on the Internet, the Washington Post reports.
SITE Institute, one of many private companies that troll extremist Web content and use secret methods to find unreleased material and release it early, against the wishes of the militants creating it, was the first to obtain an Osama bin Laden video last month.
According to the report, Rita Katz, who runs SITE, told The Post she turned the video over to the White House on the condition that it not be made public until the material was released on line by al Qaeda’s own media wing.
Katz told The Post that by the afternoon of Sept. 7, the day she turned the video over to White House officials, it had been leaked and was appearing on myriad news Web sites and television networks around the world.
Of course the White House is denying any involvement in this. Didn’t they deny any involvement in the Valerie Plame leak also? Ask Scooter Libby how that went.
To me the biggest outrage of this should come from the silence on the right. When the New York Times reported how the administration was possibly violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans, the wingnuts immediately called for investigations and called the Times traitors. Now we got a leak that has done evident harm (unlike the NY Times article), and not a peep from these people. So where is the outrage over this?
Oh I get it. The wingers only care about national security when it comes into play with their political beliefs. Their inactions on this proves that point.