I hope you are right.
Sans your scenario, we have a sell-out in a trusted position.
If a sell out, a sell-out for what?
$100 from the NY Slimes?
Posted on 08/07/2004 12:07:47 PM PDT by be-baw
LONDON (Reuters) - The revelation that a mole within al Qaeda was exposed after Washington launched its "orange alert" this month has shocked security experts, who say the outing of the source may have set back the war on terror.
Reuters learned from Pakistani intelligence sources on Friday that computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, arrested secretly in July, was working under cover to help the authorities track down al Qaeda militants in Britain and the United States when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.
"After his capture he admitted being an al Qaeda member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts," a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. "He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz."
Last Sunday, U.S. officials told reporters that someone held secretly by Pakistan was the source of the bulk of the information justifying the alert. The New York Times obtained Khan's name independently, and U.S. officials confirmed it when it appeared in the paper the next morning.
None of those reports mentioned at the time that Khan had been under cover helping the authorities catch al Qaeda suspects, and that his value in that regard was destroyed by making his name public.
A day later, Britain hastily rounded up terrorism suspects, some of whom are believed to have been in contact with Khan while he was under cover. Washington has portrayed those arrests as a major success, saying one of the suspects, named Abu Musa al-Hindi or Abu Eissa al-Hindi, was a senior al Qaeda figure.
But British police have acknowledged the raids were carried out in a rush. Suspects were dragged out of shops in daylight and caught in a high speed car chase, instead of the usual procedure of catching them at home in the early morning while they can offer less resistance.
"HOLY GRAIL" OF INTELLIGENCE
Security experts contacted by Reuters said they were shocked by the revelations that the source whose information led to the alert was identified within days, and that U.S. officials had confirmed his name.
"The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse," said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's Defense publications. "You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?
"It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It's not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it's on the front pages every time there's a development, is it?"
A source such as Khan -- cooperating with the authorities while staying in active contact with trusting al Qaeda agents -- would be among the most prized assets imaginable, he said.
"Running agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months and years of work, which may be difficult to recover."
Rolf Tophoven, head of the Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy in Essen, Germany, said allowing Khan's name to become public was "very unclever."
"If it is correct, then I would say its another debacle of the American intelligence community. Maybe other serious sources could have been detected or guys could have been captured in the future" if Khan's identity had been protected, he said.
Britain, which has dealt with Irish bombing campaigns for decades, has a policy of announcing security alerts only under narrow circumstances, when authorities have specific advice they can give the public to take action that will make them safer.
UNNECESSARY ALARM
Home Secretary David Blunkett, responsible for Britain's anti-terrorism policy, said in a statement on Friday there was "a difference between alerting the public to a specific threat and alarming people unnecessarily by passing on information indiscriminately."
Kevin Rosser, security expert at the London-based consultancy Control Risks Group, said an inherent risk in public alerts is that secret sources will be compromised.
"When these public announcements are made they have to be supported with some evidence, and in addition to creating public anxiety and fatigue you can risk revealing sources and methods of sensitive operations," he said.
In the case of last week's U.S. alerts, officials said they had ordered tighter security on a number of financial sites in New York, Washington and New Jersey because Khan possessed reports showing al Qaeda agents had studied the buildings.
Although the casing reports were mostly several years old, U.S. officials said they acted urgently because of separate intelligence suggesting an increased likelihood of attacks in the runup to the presidential election in November.
U.S. officials now say Hindi, one of the suspects arrested after Khan's name was compromised, may have been the head of the team that cased those buildings.
But the Pakistani disclosure that Khan was under cover suggests that the cell had been infiltrated, and was under surveillance at the time Washington ordered the orange alert.
The security experts said that under such circumstances it would be extraordinary to issue a public warning, because of the risk of tipping off the cell that it had been compromised. (Additional reporting by Mark Trevelyan in Berlin)
And I had thought they were rolling up as many threads as they could to try to disrupt the expected attack, and to head off problems at the Olympics and the Convention. Well, maybe when they put the panties on their heads they will spill their guts.
Kerry is killing people too. Has been for well over a year now, more like two.
btw, who is Jenjiss Khan, anyway? Is he Khan's cousin?
The Times may have toed the line during the war, but my understanding is they were pulling much the same sh!t in the post-war reconstruction years. They've always been a communist house organ.
"There's no way we screwed up this bad."
Umm....
- We're one step away from code red in DC and NYC.
- The military has SAM batteries around the Capitol.
- The same people who hit the WTC the first time hit it again, bragging all the way inbetween.
- Those in the Chain of Succession regularly visit secret bunkers.
- No one with an ounce of sense will be surprised when we're hit again.
- There are thousands of terrorist muslims in country.
- TSA can search an unlimited number of white people, but only two arabs.
- etc., etc.
There's no way we screwed up this bad? Right.
President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers): But this is absolute madness, Ambassador! Why should you build such a thing?
Ambassador de Sadesky: There were those of us who fought against it, but in the end we could not keep up with the expense involved in [listed with increasing disgust] the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. At the same time our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
President Merkin Muffley: This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.
Ambassador de Sadesky: Our source was the New York Times.
The NYT once again committed treason and Kahn's name may have been leaked by someone in Pakistan's ISI, but if there was a sting operation going on in Pakistan then Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge also gave out to much information last Sunday when he heightened security. I specifically remember Ridge mentioning that new information, particularly "out of Pakistan" justified the alert. By being so specific in the alert, Ridge let the terrorists (and the media) know too much.
Terrorists involved in the planning and/or surveillance of the specific targets named by Ridge combined with Ridge pointing to Pakistan, would have had a clear indication that a colleague of theirs with this knowledge in Pakistan had been compromised.
Thanks to the "dots" laid out by our Secretary of "Homeland Security", the terrorists could have reasonably realized that communicating with Kahn would be a risk to their operation.
A poster on another website just said the same thing.
I hope you are right.
Sans your scenario, we have a sell-out in a trusted position.
If a sell out, a sell-out for what?
$100 from the NY Slimes?
Just wish the TIMES would be added to the list of probably targets...................by either side.
~snip~
A senior White House official who mentioned the new stream of intelligence in an interview refused to say anything more about its source or content. The official said it had not been publicly disclosed out of concern that such a step could compromise intelligence and law enforcement operations in the United States and around the world. Officials would not describe those operations but said they were meant to disrupt a possible plot.
But senior federal intelligence and law enforcement officials also described the intelligence as important. They said it had reached the White House last Friday and strongly reinforced the sense of alarm prompted by the separate flow of information that was arriving at the same time via the Central Intelligence Agency from Pakistan, and that it was based on information culled from seized computer disks that contained detailed case reports of reconnaissance conducted on buildings in Manhattan, Newark and Washington in 2000 and 2001.
~snip~
The White House officials spoke in a lengthy interview arranged at the request of The New York Times in which they offered a detailed accounting of the decision-making that led to the terrorist alert.
The computer disks on which the case reports were found were linked to Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old Pakistani computer engineer who was arrested by Pakistani authorities on July 13, American officials have confirmed. They have described Mr. Khan's arrest, carried out at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency, as having provided the crucial breakthrough in the case, leading them not only to the case reports but also to information about other Qaeda officials still at large who appear to have had access to the documents.
*Note the language change in the NYT sourcing. The inference is that the confirmation came from White House officials, but they segue to American officials when making the attribution.
Geez, we went through this last night. It was the Pakistanis who revealed the name.
I picked this up from some London paper, not the NYT, but I think it says that the Pakistanis were the source.
Captured Qaeda engineer spurred attack warnings
By Douglas Jehl and David Rohde (The New York Times)
Monday, August 2, 2004
WASHINGTON: The unannounced capture of a figure from Al Qaeda in Pakistan several weeks ago led the CIA to the rich lode of information that prompted the terror alert on Sunday, according to senior U.S. officials.
The figure, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, was described by a Pakistani intelligence official as a 25-year-old computer engineer, arrested July 13, who had used and helped to operate a secret Qaeda communications system in which information was transferred via coded messages
A senior U.S. official would not confirm or deny that Khan had been the Qaeda figure whose capture led to the information. But the official said "documentary evidence" found after the capture had demonstrated in extraordinary detail that Qaeda members had for years conducted sophisticated and extensive reconnaissance of the financial institutions cited in the warnings on Sunday.
One senior U.S. intelligence official said the information was more detailed and precise than any he had seen during his 24-year career in intelligence work. A second senior U.S. official said it had provided a new window into the methods, content and distribution of Qaeda communications.
"This, for us, is a potential treasure-trove," said a third senior U.S. official, an intelligence expert, at a briefing for reporters on Sunday afternoon.
The documentary evidence, whose contents were reported urgently to Washington on Friday afternoon, immediately elevated the significance of other intelligence information gathered in recent weeks that had already been regarded as highly troubling, senior U.S. intelligence officials said. Much of that information had come from Qaeda detainees in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, as well as Pakistan, and some had also pointed to a possible attack on financial institutions, senior U.S. intelligence officials said.
The U.S. officials said the new evidence had been obtained only after the capture of the Qaeda figure. Among other things, they said, it demonstrated that Qaeda plotters had begun casing buildings in New York, Washington, and Newark, New Jersey, even before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Among the questions the plotters sought to answer, senior U.S. intelligence officials said, were how best to gain access to the targeted buildings; how many people might be at the sites at different hours and on different days of the week; whether a hijacked oil tanker truck could serve as an effective weapon; and how large an explosive device might be required to bring the buildings down.
The U.S. officials would say only that the Qaeda figure whose capture had led to the discovery of the documentary evidence had been captured with the help of the CIA.
But an account provided by a Pakistani intelligence official made clear that the crucial capture in recent weeks had been that of Khan, who is also known as Abu Talha. The intelligence official provided information describing Khan as having assisted in evaluating potential U.S. and Western targets for terrorist attacks, and as being representative of a "new Al Qaeda."
9 posted on 08/06/2004 11:49:54 PM PDT by Eva
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John Loftus pushing this theme on FNC right now. I am quick to remind everyone that he is a DEMOCRAT, despises President Bush, often has misinformation, and would not hesitate to use it if it hurts the President.
I know, Ernest at the Beach posted an article last night that claimed as much. That's when I pulled up the original article that clearly states that the Pakistanis were the source. This is a bogus story.
I intended to copy you to post #54.
Some of the posters last night wanted me to e-mail the writers of the first article that blamed the Bush administation, but I couldn't find any info on who they were or how to reach them.
I called FOX, yesterday after Jim Angle made his bogus statement regarding the Elliot retraction. I left a message on the news correction line. The next time that Angle came on the late edition, he corrected himself.
Take all with a grain of salt.............
Here is the number 1 888 369 4762 for FOX. I would call and make the correction myself, but I didn't hear it. It worked yesterday.
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