Salon: Red alert (Bush Adm.'s dangerous pattern of exposing intel)

[kskiska]

The Bush administration has a dangerous pattern of exposing intelligence operations for political gain, and that's undermining its war on terrorism.

When the Bush administration revealed that its recent decision to raise the terror-threat levels in New York and Washington was based largely on 3- to 4-year-old intelligence, it found itself under great pressure to prove the heightened alert was not simply a cynical manipulation of public fear for political purposes. In an apparent move to prove the validity of the threat, it released the name of a Pakistani al-Qaida operative, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, who had been captured in Pakistan on July 12 and was providing extremely valuable intelligence, including the information about plots against specific U.S. targets.

On Aug. 8, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice defended the White House's action, saying Khan's name was provided only "on background." While this quieted domestic critics, the move had a huge cost: the loss of a strategic intelligence asset who might eventually have helped dismantle the al-Qaida leadership in Southwest Asia.

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Critics of the Bush administration from both parties as well as some U.S. intelligence experts are now wondering whether the administration is completely incompetent in the handling of classified intelligence of strategic importance or whether there is a more philosophically based, policy-related explanation for its release of the Pakistani operative's name. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., immediately demanded an explanation from Bush's homeland security advisor, Frances Townsend. And Sen. George Allen, R-Va., declared on television last Sunday: "They should have kept their mouth shut and just said, 'We have information, trust us.'"

Although there has been some speculation that the administration's revelation was a sophisticated move to destabilize al-Qaida, Reuters quotes a former U.S. intelligence official as saying, "I don't think that the U.S. intelligence community has shown enough creativity over the last few years for anyone to think of anything as smart as misdirection, or trying to send signals to al Qaeda."

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http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/08/13/pakistan_mole/index.html