On this whole Associated Press thing, it’s good to put things in some context. Why was the AP so hellbent on publishing that we had disrupted a new al-Qaeda plot to blow up airliners with underwear bombs? The answer is clear from the article. They thought it was newsworthy that there had been a plot when when the Department of Homeland Security and the White House press secretary had both recently said that they were unaware of any plots. In fact, this discrepancy may have been what caused the leaker to leak.
Now, I am willing to stipulate that it is newsworthy whenever the White House or its cabinet members are caught saying something untrue. But once the AP contacted the White House and learned that there was an ongoing operation and the threat had always been contained, they should have questioned the motives of the leaker and they also should have stopped seeing the story as newsworthy. Did they really think it was possible for the administration to acknowledge a plot at the time they were asked about possible plots?
Consider this:
Sources later told CNN that the operative who was supposed to have carried the bomb had been inserted into al Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate by Saudi intelligence, and that the device had been handed over to U.S. analysts. One source said Saudi counterterrorism officials were upset that details of the operation had emerged in the United States because they had a network of agents inside the Yemeni branch who could have been compromised by leaks from Washington.
And this from The Guardian:
The [British] agent was recruited by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which operates in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and asked to carry a bomb aboard a US-bound plane.
The revelation is politically and legally awkward for MI6 and MI5 whose agents, unlike American ones, are banned from missions that lead to assassinations, such as the US drone attack at the weekend that killed the top al-Qaida operative in the Yemen, Fahd al-Quso. The attack is being attributed to information from the agent.
In fact, the original AP article was published the day after Fahd al-Quso met his maker. So, what kind of gotcha journalism is it to make believe that the administration was misleading the public for political advantage, rather than to protect a sensitive operation and our relations with Saudi and British intelligence?
My best guess is that we (or the Saudis) had to remove a bunch of agents-in-place who were giving intelligence on AQAP and trying to help us catch the bomb maker.
It’s not just that the AP reported the story, it’s how they reported it.
The operation unfolded even as the White House and Department of Homeland Security assured the American public that they knew of no al-Qaeda plots against the U.S. around the anniversary of bin Laden’s death. The operation was carried out over the past few weeks, officials said.
“We have no credible information that terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda, are plotting attacks in the U.S. to coincide with the anniversary of bin Laden’s death,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said on April 26.
On May 1, the Department of Homeland Security said, “We have no indication of any specific, credible threats or plots against the U.S. tied to the one-year anniversary of bin Laden’s death.”
The anniversary of bin-Laden’s death is on May 2nd. The agent provided the CIA with the bomb on approximately April 20th. The threat was over by the time they were asked about it. The man left with the bomb almost two weeks before the anniversary. No matter how you look at it, the administration hadn’t done anything wrong.
But they did have a skunk inside the tent who was willing to create huge problems for political purposes in an election year. And they had the AP lapping it up and dishing it out.
There will be a constant parade of “scandals” for the next two decades unless the GOP wins the white house. I just wish we had a press that could handle it.
If by “handle it,” you mean the press running wherever the GOP points, and barking and digging up sh*t, bringing it back to their GOP masters.
Whereupon the GOP will pet them, give them cute nicknames, say they’re a good doggie, and let the press hump their leg, then, yeah, they’ll handle it the way the same way they handled Clinton’s impeachment, the drum-up to the Iraq War and occupation, and the new attempts at impeaching Obama – which was by running wherever the GOP points, and barking and digging up sh*t, bringing it back to their masters.
Whereupon…
I think it’s more complex. Or maybe it’s actually more simple. People evolved to have a need for leadership. A king if you will. On both the left and the right, there’s a desire for a strongman who will take care of us and make us feel safe. Protect us from other tribes, make sure we follow the game or plant the fields, assuage the gods, etc.
Late in a president’s term, with one group of folks having never supported him and another deeply disappointed by the many unfulfilled (albeit never realistic) expectations, everyone turns on him. Or rather one group, which was always against him, is still there and his defenders have mostly lost interest.
Obama got reelected despite this dynamic because he still has pockets of strong support — particularly among minorities, who would have viewed a repudiation of him as a repudiation of them and their claims to a seat at the table.
Are you pining for the days when the NYT would sit on a story for a year at the request of the WH and quickly published WH disinformation as fact?
Why all the concern for the covert operations of the KSA? That bastion of freedom and democracy that spawned most of the 9/11 hijackers for starts.
And who is to say that this was nothing more than a sting operation that may have gone nowhere like several the FBI has nurtured in the past few years?
Why all the concern for the covert operations of the KSA?
Did you not notice that this was an American operation, too? Aimed at disrupting a plot to commit mass murder against Americans? There are those of us who consider the disruption of such actions worthwhile.
And who is to say that this was nothing more than a sting operation that may have gone nowhere like several the FBI has nurtured in the past few years?
Clearly you, since that would provide a ready-made excuse to not take the legitimate interest in preventing jetliners full of innocent people from being blown up into account.
Like many issues, there are grey areas in between the extremes and finding that area requires wisdom and judgment mostly on a case by case basis. I’m actually not really that upset that this leaked out. If the press is truly free, leaks will happen and that’s just the price we pay. It still doesn’t mean the Obama administration did anything wrong by investigating the leak.
I am pining for the days when Wilson passed the Espionage Act. When he put journos with big mouths in jail. When Roosevelt imposed wartime censorship.
To hell with the press.
Those self-important bastards don’t care about anything but selling papers, or maybe embarrassing politicians they don’t like.
OK, as Hugo Black used to ask re the First Amendment and the federal government, “What part of ‘Congress shall make no law’ do you not understand?”
But to hell with that and nobody has taken the First Amendment that much to heart since the administration of John Adams.
It’s late .. but everyone should read this(Digby link):
http://bit.ly/12EcTPV
If anyone goes to jail over leaking .. it should be Brennan.
Terrorist plots and their disruption by intelligence operatives are inherently interesting. Why do we need to cast about for a reason why the AP would want to run such a story?
I think this is a fascinating story. Don’t you?
There are indications that John Brennan was briefing former national security advisors like Richard Clarke.
If you are looking for a skunk in the tent, you can start with Brennan and then look down the list of those advisors, starting with Brennan himself.
The intelligence community seems to be a very chatty bunch of people.
The House Intelligence Committee had also been briefed. I can see a scenario where, say, Michele Bachmann would spread this so as to make the adminsitration look like it had lied.
Fine. He’s a skunk in the tent. And AP were skunks outside it and belong in jail.
Charlie Savage, New York Times, September 30, 2009: White House Proposes Changes in Bill Protecting Reporters’ Confidentiality
Take this with as many grains of salt as you think appropriate. The restoration of candor instead of truthiness on the part of the White House communications operation would go a long way to helping the public sort this out. Right now, they are contributing to the cognitive dissonance that is exploitable by the GOP.
And the practice of using impeccably documented warrants for searches and seizures would go a long way to avoiding these sorts of situations. Unfortunately, over a period of 40 years, we have a law enforcment community that has gotten used to taking para-Constitutional shortcuts and getting away with it.
In circling the wagons, don’t ignore the continuity of dysfunction that created this overreach. The political police are not really interested in the President’s stated agenda.
And the GOP? They would love this seizure from journalists to become a precedent with the byline, “See a Democratic President started this practice.”
And don’t forget there is a major skunk in Saudi intelligence–Prince Bandar bin Sultan. That flight of Saudis out of the US during the air lockdown after 9/11 should not be forgotten.
emptywheel’s latest.
There’s a Place for Resolving Disputes, and the Administration Chose Not To Use It
It seem silly to expect federal law enforcement to voluntarily throw up barriers in front of its ability to do its job, all on their own, when they think their actions are appropriate, and Congress has given them the authority to do so.
That’s Congress’s job. The Democrats in Congress should call the Republicans’ bluff and resubmit the bill to make phone records requests subject to a warrant instead of a subpoena, at least in cases involving the press.
This. The idea that the Executive Branch is going to be an effective check on the power of the Executive Branch is crazy.
I think that expectation should be on them. Whether it’s effective or not, the system works better if actors feel a need to police themselves.
But they did feel the need to police themselves, and did what they consider a good job doing so.
Look at Deputy AG Cole’s letter: he wrote about taking the concerns about the press into account, and limiting the scope of the subpoenaed information appropriately.
The problem is, those are judgement calls, and of course the Justice Department’s judgement is going to lean towards the Justice Department’s position.
It’s not a lack of good intent that makes self-policing inadequate, but the natural tendency to consider oneself to be right.
Which is one more reason why we need independent courts to adjudicate.
It appears that Booman doesn’t read Emptywheel. Why, I don’t know. Boo doesn’t mention that they already, supposedly, interviewed 550 people over this “leak.” And why get the phone records for the AP’s Hartford bureau when no one there works on national security stories. As EW said, she thinks this “leak” is just a small part of something else they’re after.
House, apparently. That’s from an earlier post of EW, where she cites a new AP story which provides a timeline.
Here is EW’s timeline, and her commentary on it:
I’m pretty convinced that this is the right take on what happened. British and Saudi intelligence might complain about the leaks, because they infiltrate terrorist groups. The US, in contrast, just assassinates suspected terrorists with drone strikes. After al-Quso was killed with a drone strike, the operation was a success and over, as far as USG was concerned.
To repeat, the problem here is not the AP, but Brennan, who got promoted to CIA director after he blabbed operational details, damaging British and Saudi efforts to infiltrate terrorist cells.
It’s the same with the Obama administration as with the Bush II administration: incompetence gets you promoted. Putin understands this. That’s why that spy in Moscow was unmasked so theatrically:
You keep on getting one detail wrong. You wrote:
The original AP story does not say the threat had always been contained, which leads me to believe that the AP did not know that. That fact emerged from Brennan’s leak to Richard Clarke et al., not from the leak that the AP based its story on. That is why the discussion is about leaks, not a single leak.
And a crucial question that is still open is whether the original AP story by itself, without the further leak from Brennan, was enough to compromise any ongoing operations.
Also, that there were ongoing operations that were compromised by the leaks is just an unsubstantiated claim. And as you say, “the original AP article was published the day after Fahd al-Quso met his maker.” Maybe all operations ended then, as far as the CIA was concerned. The Saudis said that they “had a network of agents inside the Yemeni branch”. So why did the US assassinate al-Quso in that case?
The Saudis “were upset that details of the operation had emerged in the United States”. But it wasn’t the AP that revealed details of the operation. Brennan did. All the original AP story said was: “The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought his plane tickets when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb”. See? No details.
There was a definite screw up by the White House here. Hence the witch hunt on the CIA.
The leaker may not have VP attached to his name like Cheney did when he outted Plame, but the consequences may have been close to the same level. And if the leaker is still working close to Nat’l Security our exposure has not been contained.
This leaker has compromised our relationship with two stalwart allies, the Saudi’s and the UK and has certainly warned off any other country that before this we could count on for help.
I would not call either of those “stalwart allies” although the UK comes closer than the Saudis.
Countries do not have permanent allies or permanent enemies, just permanent interests. And Saudi interests do not necessarily include supporting this President in any and all matters. The same goes for the nebulous label “government official”.
The allegation is that the leaker compromised our relationship. Because the fact are not known to the public and likely not disclosable to the public, one must treat that as intelligence community spin.
As an aside:
Damn, I wish our agencies were restrained like that.
He turned them over voluntarily, but AP was never given that opportunity.
they could have tried to quash the subpoena, do we know if they made that attempt?
Well no, they didn’t have that option, that’s the point.
The government didn’t do anything wrong. They can just roll up to the phone company for whatever they want. The press is simply getting its blows in for the DoJ essentially conducting a stakeout on a newspaper office for any suspicious behavior.
There’s no story here. It’s just the millionth time the press and the government have to relearn that they aren’t all on the same team.
yep all the “scandals” this week are a load of crap anyway
Move on and focus on the things that matters
What matters is that the goverment had the authority to roll up to the phone company without cause and pick the information they wanted.
The scandal is that in the US warrants and courts no longer matter.
That’s a little dramatic, they asked for phone logs from calls to check for calls that originated in the government.
They didn’t roll up a news organization.
I agree there should be judicial review but that’s not what the law says right now so that’s a moot point until we get the law changed.
This sentence amuses me greatly. It gets funnier each time I read it.
Yes, why would anyone report on the fact that half the governments in the known world are conducting counterintelligence missions in Yemen against a terrorist group with the known intention/capacity to blow up airplanes? Especially when you have the hook of politicians and various interested parties bragging about defanging these groups into oblivion through the drone war every other day of the year.
The venality of you obots who have become overnight hardliners on government opsec is amazing. The Right Wing Menace!!! is coming to get us all! The state is being undermined from within! No one is safe!