As if we needed more to confirm how inept Bush & Co. are, this takes the cake. Or, they did it on purpose to destroy their intel competition. Can’t have someone else knowing what they haven’t found out themselves. Or, they wanted al-Qaeda to know they were compromised. Can’t keep a war going if the other side loses.
All of those sound conspiracy crazy? Give a better reason.
Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda’s Secrets
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.
these jokers are no better at leading a war than the knuckleheads who made vietnam into a total disaster
what a pack of losers.
CIA? State Department.
The entire Department of State is full of strong Democrat supporters. They’ve been sabotaging Bush ever since he got in office. Yes, I’m calling them traitors, though they might not technically be committing it.
One of the things that annoys me about Bush is that he was not able to clean up that particular swamp. He should have disbanded the CIA, if that’s what it took.
Nimrods, they phucked up, they trusted the government!
What did they think was going to happen???
U.S. Intelligence services are STILL the same ones that missed 9/11 and about everything else that al-Qaeda has ever planned and launched.
The reason Bush is in this mess is because he places loyalty to him personally above intelligence and knowledge. Then he wonders what happened. The president has way to many “buddies” in his inner circle.
#2 – Wow… I’m just freakin speechless…
ANYWAY…
Uncle Dave – I know Bush is a benefactor of nepotism, and lacks the leadership acumen to be the manager of a Pizza Hut, but I doubt you can really trace the responsibility for this back to his desk.
Hell, he likely doesn’t know it happened. After all, he doesn’t read newspapers.
Nice photo. Kid on the payroll?
#2 republicans started and are leading this war and they have done a crap job of it — they had iraq conquered in 3 weeks, and all these years later they still can’t control it because they had no plan in place to control it and they still have no idea what to do.
this thing is gonna drag on for years to come because they failed.
face it, they suck at this.
They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government’s ability to anticipate attacks.
No effect on U.S. efforts… but big effect on a successful NGO effort..
…and you can’t diminish what is already inconsequential.
While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. “We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies,” said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Yeah, you have sophisticated means of watching it after al-Quida publishes it…
SITE gave it to you before it was even published…
Looks like the knuckle-draggers of Bushco, Inc. are at it again.
They’re itching to go to war with Iran so much, they will probably blame it on them.
Grog, how long was the US in Japan? How long did it take to reconstruct Germany? Less time than the US has been in Iraq?
My preference was to just pull a Clinton and use high altitude bombing on the dump. Arabs, Persians, Jews, “Palestinians”, and Pushtans are a PITA to deal with, and that’s from personal experience. No, the sob sisters wanted to do it the hard way, and snivle about what the hard way requires.
SITE gave it to you before it was even published…
Nice of ’em, huh?
Israelis don’t do ANYTHING that doesn’t directly benefit themselves. (SITE… wholly owned subsidiary of MOSSAD, obviously.)
Cry me a river.
#12 point well taken, however, had bushCo had a plan to put up a real government before they went in, our boys and girls wouldn’t still be getting shot at EVERY DAY
and there ain’t no one to blame for that other than the man who pulled the trigger — and if you say otherwise, then you are saying the bush is not the decider
which is it? is bush in charge or not?
Geez, how frickin’ stupid can our government get?
Hey, I thought you guys were in favor of publishing classified info about how the government operates against Al-Qaeda?
It fucking figures!
I wonder if we could WIPE all our federal intelligence agencies and START OVER…
Most of them are FAT and need a good clean up anyway.
The WH is out now with a statement denying they leaked. Impressive damage control. They are quick to go on the attack and quick to circle the wagons, lying sacks that they are.
The background story on this is actually very interesting, and the damage that has been caused by the open mouths in the White House is much deeper than it appears.
I remember thinking to myself how strange it was that we were being given advance notice of a Bin-Laden tape.
Due to this leak, deep sources within the terrorist organizations have been compromised. Only a limited number of people within the terrorist organization knew about the tape in advance, and those that knew are now under suspicion about having talked and are now in deep trouble. And we don’t know who those that were cooperating with “SITE” were also cooperating with… my guess is Mossad. So this “leak” could snowball across the whole Intelligence community. This is a MAJOR fuckup.
Here is what happened in summary: The White House, and only the White House, at the highest levels, was informed by this company (SITE) that their sources had provided them with an advance copy of a new Bin-Laden speech. They offered to provide an advance copy to teh White House, so the US government would be prepared for it’s release, could do early analysis, etc. They dealt only with people with need-to-know and top-secret security clearances within the White House. SITE provided secure access to the video. Within a couple of hours, the video had been downloaded dozens of times, all using the security protocols that had been provided to the White House.
Something that should have been treated as “TOP Secret” in order to protect sources became common knowledge, such common knowledge that it was on the evening newscast.
So now the main computer based communication system used by Al-Quaida, infiltrated not only by SITE but probably by US government resources, has been shut down. Hopefully the US government has been able to find and infiltrate the new system that they may be using.
The damage produced by the utter incompetence of the White House staff has probably done deep deep damage to the US intelligence efforts by their actions.
This is not a Democrat or Republican issue… this is an issue about people on the highest levels of our government being able to be entrusted to use their brains and consider the consequences of their actions, specially in a case like this one.
If the White House has any sense of leadership, it will immediately suspend and investigate anyone involved with this issue. The people that allowed this to make the media should be investigated for treason.
Grog, Bush is responsible for what happens on his watch. It’s part of the job.
Just as Clinton was responsible for everything that happened on his watch. It goes with the job.
As for “Who’s in charge?” LOL Are you complaining that he is not excercising Imperial authority you accuse him of trying to grab?
Bush went with the best information available at the time. People were believing what Saddam was trying to convince the world, that he had WMDs. Go back and take another look at what was in the news while Bush was getting ready to invade Iraq; one of the arguments against going in was that Saddam was going to use WMDs against the US troops. Remember that bit?
Now, Saddam was human, with his own motives and with his own concerns, most of them having nothing to do with the US.
He was probably trying to convince Iran they better not mess with him, and he, from bits and pieces I’ve picked up around the web, probably believed that Bush was a moron, easily lead by the nose (gee, where would he get that idea?), and he believed the Russians, French, and Germans he was doing business with when they said they would block any direct action by the UN. So, what he was picking up from the US was that the US would make noises and do nothing, just like Clinton and Carter.
Anyhow, Saddam miscalculated.
Come on Awake, this leak didn’t cause any harm. It would be obvious to the biggest morons that the government would be monitoring websites, so surely Al-Qaeda knew before the leak. The real harm comes from having the government monitoring websites to begin with, and it’s even worse that it is being outsourced to private mercenaries now.
Awake, if that’s what happened, then heads should be rolling in the White House. Full agreement.
What I’d read implied that an unspecified security agency had leaked.
This looks like a great reason to impeach Bush.
Aside from any attempts to assess damage or assign blame in this incident, what I find especially interesting about this is the realization that there are “for profit” intelligence gathering companies that rival or augment those of our own government. That creates an interesting dynamic, to say the least, and opens the topic up to a whole host of questions regarding who did what and why.
We’ve seen growing privatization encroach into a number of formerly military functions, such as with Blackwater security, and now it’s clear that we have that same opportunity for in the intelligence sector as well.
#24 – I’ll take any reason…
They say impeachment proceedings will grind the gears of government to a halt…
And this is bad why?
22 – MikeN
Websites were not involved. Not everything that uses the Internet is a website you know?
This came from within the international INTRANET of Al-Quaida.
If you think of Al-Quaida as a big company, it was their internal network, not open to the public, that was used for communication between subsidiaries. Companies do use Internet technologies to communicate between their branches, send data, route email between their systems, host email, etc.
If it was used ‘securely’, then there may have been lots of encryption and other security measures involved… all of which become invalid and abandoned when a breach is suspected, and new protocols put in place.
The network that may have been considered secure by Al-Quaida was exposed as being compromised, and the proof is that the network, and all it’s resources, were shut down. Mail servers gone, mailing lists gone, who knows what else that was being shared by terrorist organizations gone.
What happened is tantamount to US officials screaming “Hey, we are wiretapping your phone!”
Even if the damage is not as large as possible, it is the fact that major damage could have taken place that is the crime, not the actual losses. We will probably never know the real damage created by this boneheaded leak, but that is not the point… the leak and it’s possible repercussions are the problem.
(Anxiously awaiting a response better than ‘Bla… bla…”)
why would anyone trust the same bunch of traitors who outed a CIA agent because her husband publicly told an inconvenient truth? I wonder how much Halliburton’s stock has gone up since the Al Qaeda tape?
All of this now implies we’ll finally get some really spectacular terrorist happenings, the kind that arrives just in time ’round the dinner hour so we can watch it on TV.
My point stands as is, whether it was a website or an intranet, any fool would know that the US government is watching, so this leak does no harm.
#31 – The point is that if you break the other guy’s code… you don’t say anything… You don’t do anything to let him know what you know…
What a wonderful way of wasting valuable resources.