Juan Cole has an update/summary on the al-Qaeda agent we had in Pakistan until his cover was blown. It's well worth reading. My takeaway is that even if the US wasn't directly responsible for blowing his cover, Ridge's press conference and raising the terror alert sent enough people scurrying for detail that someone was probably bound to spill the beans. So even if the Bush administration didn't leak the guy's name, they might as well have. What's fascinating is that first we got warnings of al-Qaeda casing NY, and then we got warnings not too long after than the "chatter" had quieted down, thus triggering more panic in the Bush administration. Looks to me like the chatter stopped because the bad guys realized we could listen in, so they clammed up. Question: are our guys so dumb they didn't realize they were the reason for the drop in chatter, or were they deliberately trying to spin the news?
Posted by Jason at August 18, 2004 09:42 AM