Say Anything Blog

It’s too early to tell where the leak came from, but the New York Sun is reporting that because of it Al Qaeda’s world wide internet has gone dark:

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda’s Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden’s September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy’s system.

The intelligence blunder started with what appeared at the time as an American intelligence victory, namely that the federal government had intercepted, a full four days before it was to be aired, a video of Osama bin Laden’s first appearance in three years in a video address marking the sixth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. On the morning of September 7, the Web site of ABC News posted excerpts from the speech.

We were watching and they didn’t know it. Until, that is, someone decided to leak the information. The shutdown of that intelligence source was almost immediate:

One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw. “We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak,” the official said. “We lost an important keyhole into the enemy.”

I don’t understand why the Bush Administration doesn’t go after these leakers with a vengeance. It happens again and again and again. In the “truth is stranger than fiction” category, it seems that we’ll spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours investigating who “leaked” Valerie Plame’s identity to the press and we seem to casually brush aside crippling intelligence leaks such as these.

Will they go after whoever leaked this one? I doubt it.