I’ve long admired the work Marcy Wheeler does, but she is not writing Gospel and she has a conspiratorial bent that is usually informed but not the same thing as the truth. When it comes to the case of Undiebomb 2.0, as she likes to call it, she is suggesting very strongly that the subpoenas of the Associated Press are a cover for something larger. She’s also convincing a lot of people that she’s right. But I don’t think she is.
For starters, I think it is a fundamental error of analysis to focus on the publication of the Associated Press article. And that leads to further mistakes, like blaming John Brennan for doing the damage the leaker actually caused and thinking the administration had signed off on making the information public because they planned to announce it the next day.
The focus should be on the moment the Associated Press confronted the administration with the information that they had acquired about the foiled bomb plot. That happened on May 2nd, 2012.
The news service was prepared to publish its scoop on May 2, 2012. But in discussions with government officials, the CIA stressed to AP that publishing anything about the operation to obtain the bomb and thwart the plot would create grave national security dangers and compromise a “sensitive intelligence operation.”
Michael J. Morell, the CIA’s deputy director, gave AP reporters some additional background information to persuade them to hold off, [former White House national security spokesman Tommy] Vietor said. The agency needed several days more to protect what it had in the works.
The same informant who acquired the undiebomb and gave it to the CIA also helped the CIA track down and kill Fahd al-Quso on May 6th. On May 7th, the CIA informed the Associated Press that their pressing national security concerns had been resolved and began negotiating with the AP over the timing of their publication.
In the interim period between finding out that someone had leaked the operation to the AP and beginning negotiations with the AP over publication, the American Intelligence Community had the unhappy responsibility of informing the British and Saudi Intelligence Communities that the cover of their informant was about to be blown. This was especially troublesome for the UK because they have laws against assassination, which meant the plan to eliminate Fahd al-Quso could come back to bite them if it went ahead (and it did go ahead).
I admit that there is something funny with the story about how the informant delivered a bomb to the CIA without blowing his own cover, but that’s what we’re being told.
…U.S. national security officials familiar with the matter said the real damage was done by the original leak to the AP because it revealed that the FBI had possession of the bomb. It also ended any chance of using the informant in the future. “They were going to keep him in there,” said the official.
Because I cannot quite envision how this worked, I just have to set it aside as an oddity. What we do know is that the informant and his family had to be hustled out of Yemen.
U.S. officials acknowledge that, after they were contacted by the AP and told it was going to publish the story, they alerted British intelligence, which scrambled to extract the informant and his family from Yemen.
So, before the AP ever published anything, the leak had caused a rift with Britain and Saudi Arabia, caused an emergency rescue mission of an in-place informant, complicated the mission to eliminate Fahd al-Quso, and caused alarm because they knew that the AP was going to report that the FBI had possession of the bomb.
If anyone wants to look at that and say that the White House wanted this information to come out so that they could take credit for it, they’re high on crack. But, unfortunately, that’s what digby is arguing:
I’m going to take a wild leap and guess that the AP sweep was a CYA operation to placate the British who were upset that the AP even had the original story of the glorious thwarted bomb plot — a story that the administration clearly wasn’t all that upset about except for the timing. (According to the AP, the administration had planned to make the announcement themselves a day later.) After all, if the agreement to hold the story broke down over the alleged request that the government not comment for one hour as government officials alleged, it’s fairly obvious their concerns were less about national security and more about spin. It was only after Brennan spilled the beans about their real secret that this thing came apart.
See how wrong that looks? Let’s start with the fact that the administration was planning to make an announcement the next day. Does digby truly not understand that the announcement was planned as a reaction to the article? If the article had not existed, there never would have been any announcement.
The White House and CIA declined to comment for this article. But former White House national security spokesman Tommy Vietor, recalling the discussion in the administration last year, said officials were simply realistic in their response to AP’s story. They knew that if it were published, the White House would have to address it with an official, detailed statement.
“There was not some press conference planned to take credit for this,” Vietor said in an interview. “There was certainly an understanding [that] we’d have to mitigate and triage this and offer context for other reporters.”
Marcy Wheeler responds to this quote from Mr. Vietor this way:
Jeebus Pete! If your idea of “mitigating and triaging” AP’s fairly complimentary story is to make it far, far worse by hinting about the infiltrator, you’re doing it wrong!
First of all, the the AP‘s article was not complimentary at all. It accused the administration of lying to the public about whether any threats existed around the anniversary of bin-Laden’s death (which was the probable motivation for the leak). It was that seeming contradiction that caused the White House to go into damage control. As for Ms. Wheeler’s assertion that Tommy Vietor made things worse, she is inferring that Mr. Vietor was coordinating with John Brennan in the damage control, which gets us to the next point. Ms. Wheeler has been going on and on about how the real harm from the leak was caused by John Brennan when he did a teleconference with former counterterrorism officials just after the publication of the AP article in which he revealed that there had never been any danger to the public because we had “inside control” of the plot. As a result of that briefing, Richard Clarke went on television and said that we had an informant.
But I think you can see from what I’ve written above that all the damage from the leak was already done at that point. The Brits were angry and legally compromised, the Saudis were pissed, a very sensitive operation to take out Fahd al-Quso had been complicated (and possibly sped up), the informant had been rescued and lost as an asset, and the article had been published revealing that the FBI had possession of the bomb. John Brennan had caused none of that.
In other words, it’s the wrong way of looking at it to think that the publication of the article was the main problem. All that added was the bit about the FBI having the bomb. The rest of the damage was done by the leak to the AP and the knowledge that publication could not be delayed indefinitely.
I’d also point out that, as far as I know, the alleged bomb maker, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, is still on the loose. And this bomb had no metal pieces and could only be detected by body-scanners. I have no way of proving it, but it’s possible that Mr. al-Asisi would not still be out there concerning our national security team if this leak had not occurred.
In conclusion, I think it is plenty evident that this leak caused considerable damage on its own, and we do not need to posit some massive conspiracy at the Department of Justice to sweep up a bunch of ancillary leakers on other subjects. The DOJ went after the source of the leak because it’s possible that the person responsible is still in a position of responsibility and might make similar errors in judgment in the future.
Whether the scope of the DOJ’s surveillance was appropriate or not, I think people are minimizing the impact of the leak and maximizing their imaginations.
Good summary. I find it amazing that so few people seem to care that a useful and productive asset for keeping the US safe was compromised and endangered because some nitwit broke the law by leaking confidential information.
I mean, sure the beltway press it’s expected for them to be focused on anything else. But supposed progressive bloggers?
How about the idea that this person was a whistleblower?
I think they were just trying to nail the administration for lying about whether or not there was a threat from al-Qaeda. They did it to score points in an election year.
You can’t claim to be a whistleblower unless you provide information on actual malfeasance. The administration should be given some leeway on responding to queries on security threats.
Exactly. What was the administration supposed to say? That, in fact, they had infiltrated a plot and were in the process or rolling up the cell?
I don’t think this was a whistleblower. Do we really think that it would be prudent for the WH to say ‘oh yeah we have a bunch of threats on the anniversary of the killing of OBL. In fact we are in the process of disrupting one now–and may get a bomb maker who has been in our sites for some time.’
We aren’t talking about corruption, misconduct, illegal activity, etc.
If I put on my tin foil hat, I have my own theory about the person who could have leaked this to the AP.
A certain David Petraeus?
Absolutely. It makes the most sense. Tooting his horn about successful CIA missions, cultivating more media contacts/sycophants, undermining the Obama WH, and that he has a history of this behavior.
Yeah, but he’s probably smart enough to have a minion do something like that. The DCI can’t call up the AP to rat out the WH.
In 3 years and 8 months do I have a story for you!
Is it interesting that the AP story appeared May 2, around the same time as Jill Kelley began anonymously spreading news of the Petraeus-Broadwell affair.
The AP story appeared on May 7, the day after al-Quso was assassinated. emptywheel has a timeline. May 2 was the anniversary of bin Laden’s assassination, when presumably the bombing was supposed to take place.
My suspicion, based on nothing but the way DC seems to work, is that it was a showboater.
Both Petraeus and Brennan fall into that category but so do a lot of “consultants” who are chummy with folks with clearances who like to talk shop.
Gee, a pool of 550 suspects on this one operation shows how the clearances have gotten out of hand. Really? 550 people need to know the entire operation and its status and…whatever else got reported to AP?
I do not think it was Brennan in this case. I would say the fact that he is still there post investigation would indicate that.
I highly doubt that 550 people knew the entire operation but they could certainly know pieces.
The investigation is complete?
I think we can assume that they had thoroughly reviewed phone and email communications by the time Brennan was nominated and confirmed.
This is a late response I know, but I don’t think the term “whistleblower” does justice to what this person did. The damage it caused to legitimate US interests was way too much “collateral damage” if the person’s intent was only to just blow the whistle.
I find it amazing that so few people seem to care that a useful and productive asset for keeping the US safe was compromised and endangered because some nitwit broke the law by leaking confidential information.
That’s because you subscribe to the belief, which turns out to be quite controversial in certain quarters, that preventing al Qaeda from committing acts of mass murder is useful and productive.
emptywheel didn’t invent the position she has taken on the leak to the AP herself. She is basically believing the AP’s account instead of the administration’s. Two days ago, the AP published A look at satements about foiled terror plot.
That’s emptywheel’s take on the matter in a nutshell.
You regularly go through incredible mental convolutions to give this administration the benefit of the doubt, Boo. (An example is your suggestion that the Obama secretly wants to lose the Plan B case, and is merely appealing because offering birth control to 11 year olds is incredibly unpopular according to you, even though a poll indicates that a majority of women believe that birth control pills should be sold over the counter.) What you are doing is choosing to believe the White House instead of the AP. For me, in contrast, this administration has long lost any credibility, so I’ll believe a reputable news organization instead of the White House any day. In any case, part of the business of government is lying, whereas the business of the press is revealing the truth. So as a general matter, the press should be believed instead of the government, when the two tell conflicting stories. That’s just common sense.
Also, there seems to be a conflict between the CIA and the White House here. (That is a new theme of emptywheel’s, where she is going beyond what the AP has written.) The CIA told the AP that “the national security concerns have been allayed”. Do you think the AP is lying here? If the CIA cared about continuing the operation, why did it tell the AP in effect that the operation was over? I raised this point yesterday, but you didn’t respond. To repeat, I find it very hard to believe that the AP would run a story if it were told by the CIA that doing so would compromise an ongoing counterterrorism operation. So the White House’s story just doesn’t make any sense.
The CIA cut a deal with the AP that the government would give the AP one hour after publishing the story before responding. But the White House was only willing to give them one minute. What has been driving this thing from the beginning is Obama’s obsession with total control and secrecy. He is revealing a totalitarian personality.
Apparently, you are incapable of understanding anything I have written in this article because your comment is totally unresponsive to what I have written.
I am only going to do this once because it is exhausting.
The damage done by the leak to the AP was as follows:
The damage done by Brennan’s damage control?
None. It was already done.
You are also badly confused by the press conference and the negotiations over publishing.
The administration knew that they couldn’t prevent publication forever. Once they got their man (assassinated him) and removed their asset from danger, they had no more pressing reasons to give the AP so they decided to try to get the story out themselves. They wanted an extra day, the AP wouldn’t give it to them. The CIA tried to bargain with them by offering them an hour with no official statements, but the White House wisely refused those conditions, and so the article was published before the White House was prepared to coordinate its response. Brennan then went on to try to damage control, but even if he had told everything he knew about the informant it wouldn’t have mattered because all the damage was already done.
It’s not like the cell didn’t know what happened when it was published that the FBI was examining it. The informant had already been removed to protect his life.
You’re arguing in circles, while thinking you have a persuasive case. Your case depends on believing everything the administration has said about this.
I am capable of understanding what you’ve written. I just don’t accept your premises, which are basically administration talking points. It seems that whenever the administration says anything, you instantly believe and internalize it, without being able to look at it critically. The AP says the White House was going to announce the foiled plot itself. Your account requires believing that the AP is lying but the White House isn’t. To repeat, the government is more likely to lie than the press.
Obviously, this affair will become clearer if and when the identity of the leaker is revealed. If the leaker is John Brennan, as TarheelDem suggests, however, we will never be told who the leaker is.
Saying that the leak was made to help Romney is a very serious charge, and requires one to believe that someone in the intelligence community acted very unprofessionally, at grave risk to himself. Why would someone make this leak to damage Obama, risking being prosecuted under the Espionage Act? In any case, the leak turned out not to be very damaging at all, further undermining your claim that it was done to damage Obama.
As Barney Frank famously said, “Talking to you is like talking to a coffee table.”
I never said the AP lied, and the fact that you accused me of saying that proves you have understood exactly nothing you have read here today.
Of course the AP said that the administration was going to give a press conference on it the next day. The White House negotiated with the AP to get them to delay publication until the next day so that they would be prepared to respond. The AP refused. The press conference was for damage control of the “mildly complimentary” article the AP was going to publish.
I used to believe this too, but Fox News, Conrad Black, and AP itself (in previous cases – notably Iraq reporting) have proven that sentiment to be false. Not that I think the Obama Administration is open in any sense, nor that I think they don’t try to spin like a whirling tornado, but not outright lies (not counting Obama’s campaign promises which are covered by “lies, damn lies, and campaign promises”).
Today’s journalists are not yesterday’s journalists. Their loyalty is to the almighty buck, not Truth.
Why would someone out Valerie Plame, risking being prosecuted under the Espionage Act?
That leak was done by Cheney’s office, so doubtless the leaker did not think that he would be dealt with harshly if discovered. It’s different if the leak is done to hurt an administration.
The leak is not necessarily different if done to hurt the administration. The administration may have been put in the position of being harmed either way. Harmed by the leak and harmed if the person who leaked the information is revealed.
My hunch is that revealing the person who is responsible for the leaks may have caused other problems.
The only reason the leak was not damaging to the WH is because the AP sat on the story at the request of the CIA in order for them to extract the asset.
So original story would have been Obama WH is misleading the public and downplaying the threat of terrorist attacks.
The story they ended up running was about the foiled terror plot which made the Obama administration look good–hence the Republican calls for an investigation into the leak.
This really is not difficult to understand. The leak turned out not to be damaging to the Obama administration because all of the involved intelligence agencies scrambled to wrap things up. The story the AP ended up running is NOT the story they wanted to run.
So you’re saying the leaker thought that the AP would run the story without consulting with the government first? Also, the terror plot was already foiled when the AP got the leak.
We don’t know that the reason the CIA asked the AP to sit on the story was “in order for them to extract the asset”. British/Saudi/American intelligence got their hands on the bomb on April 20, with the asset leaving Yemen to hand them the bomb; the AP went to the CIA, telling them they were working on the story, on May 2.
What we do know is that Fahd al-Quso was killed by a drone strike on May 6, and the government told the AP that “the national security concerns have been allayed” on May 7.
Um the bomb was not the only thing of interest.
We don’t know that. Anglo-American intelligence got their hands on the bomb on April 20; presumably the double agent got it a little earlier. The timing suggests that he was meant to use it on May 2, the anniversary of bin Laden’s assassination. A question that has come up here several times is how the double agent could have avoided falling under suspicion after he didn’t use the bomb.
Thwarted al-Qaida bomb plot linked to US drone strike operation in Yemen
So I don’t understand what more could have been of interest, once al-Quso—whom the US had been after for some time—and his al-Qaida companion were killed. Or are you saying that the AP forced the CIA to kill al-Quso, too?
The Obama administration’s preferred method of dealing with terrorists is to assassinate them. So it is not clear to me at all that it intended to continue this counterintelligence operation. (This is not to say the Saudis and the Brits weren’t interested in continuing it, either.)
You are asking the media to act as police for members of the government with clearances who leak information, likely for a variety of political reasons.
That is not the AP’s job. In fact the notion that the media should embargo information when any government official asserts a national security privilege is contrary to the way this country was set up. It shows politicized or lazy management of personnel in the the intelligence community.
It is the government’s responsibility to keep the secrets, not the media’s.
And the fundamental contradiction is having too many secrets in a democratic society. Which do you want to fix? Government being more judicious about what constitutes secrets and more limiting in the folks who have clearances? Or a dramatic reduction in civil liberties and increase in opacity in the way government operates?
Because the information about the impact of the leak constitutes a leak itself, and a self-serving one, I think that scepticism about government reports is warranted.
According to Holder, the leak came from one of 550 people who were read into the operation. So the question to ask is “Cui bono?” Who of those 550 benefited from the leak and what benefits did they get?
In the case of UndieBomber 1.0, there were government assurances of safety, and no one interrupted the UndieBomber’s operation; he paid the price for bad technology.
AP is being treated like they are the criminals. AP asserts that a government contact told them that they could publish. They acted in good faith with both the source and the decisions to embargo and release the information.
Petraeus and John Brennan both seem to play fast and loose with the press to benefit their own careers. Why isn’t John Brennan suspect number one?
And why is it that no law enforcement agencies see fit to get warrants anymore in cases that deal with national security?
I’ve considered your coverage, digby’s, and emptywheel’s. Marcy Wheeler has made more of an attempt to sort out the contradictory information and examine it in terms of what we know of the personalities of certain public players of the media.
Also, I would not automatically assume that the Saudis are playing straight with the US intelligence community. Or that purported knowledge of which al Quaeda in the Arabian Peninsula operatives are involved.
Is it conclusive that the leak caused damage just because US government officials say so? Or the Washington Post reports that they say so?
We are neither protecting national security nor preserving the Constitution by maintaining this huge Rube Goldberg contraption of agencies, contractors, and questionable sources of information that are pulled together into the national defense, intelligence, and homeland security institutions that have grown up in the past 66 years.
My bottom line is that someone who was read into the operation thought he could help Romney by running to the AP with evidence that the White House press secretary and a spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security had lied when they said that there we no known plots timed to the anniversary of bin-Laden’s death.
In fact, this plot wasn’t timed to that anniversary in a literal sense, but close enough to cause a stir, right?
And, as a result, they did some serious damage to our foreign relations and quite possibly our best chance to get the expert bomb-maker who continues to try to bring down our civilian aircraft.
If you don’t think that is serious, fine. If you don’t think the administration is justified in doing whatever it can to find the leaker, fine.
If you want to raise larger issues about our role in the world or drones or whatever, fine.
All this article says is that there is no reason to believe that the DOJ did such a broad search of phone numbers because they are trying to find other leakers who leaked about more important stuff. And I’m pointing out some rather glaring errors in Marcy’s reasoning that are related to timing. That’s it.
I think the AP ought to have considered the motivations of the leaker and the reason why the White House had not been forthcoming and not written a gotcha article that tried to make them look dishonest. But they had a scoop and they acted responsibly as far as working with the intel community.
I have often thought that about the Wall Street media’s use of “background” statements and the propensity of government officials to use the media for career goals. But that rests on the ability of the reporter to be psychic about the motives of the source–unless they are very transparent. Which is why I don’t think that the investigation will come up with Michele Bachmann as the leaker, despite the fact that she might have been (or thought she had been) read into the operation. Sussing out motives of skilled DC players is not a common reportorial skill.
The AP essentially notified the administration of the leak and embargoed the story. The information that threw them off, as I understand it, was the report that the President was going to do a press conference about it. That is hardly a national security reason for delaying a story longer.
The disclaimer about “known threats” insulates the President from criticism if one later appears; that’s its rhetorical function.
What exactly are you saying that the AP should have done? Avoid the story entirely because it was transparently politically motivated? Was that slant from the source or from AP’s writer?
Yes, there are bigger issues that are going begging for attention that could prevent situations like this from occurring and calling the President’s respect of the Constitution into question. And they need to be addressed.
The way that DOJ has handled this case is a potentially dangerous precedent for curtailing the freedom of the press. They did a legal end-run around the Fourth Amendment. Lieberman would have loved it.
Once again, the press is under no obligation to do the government’s business no matter how much you or I would like that to happen.
Not really psychic. It’s narratological skill, and it’s what good bloggers often do (good-bad pundits like Maureen Dowd, too). And historians. Reporters nowadays often think it’s unethical, I think (what’s great about Charlie Savage). Wheeler’s brilliant beyond belief at sourcing and remembering vast amounts of data and connecting them, I think she might be the single most valuable person in the whole sphere, but she’s often not quite coherent because she does’t work out how a story goes (better than Greenwald, whose only story is “because he’s evil”); she needs a Balzac or John Le Carré working with her to draw the story out. I’ve often hoped I could do it, but alas, I’m really not smart enough to master the kind of material she works with. But if you really want to know what happened in Benghazi (I think it’s mainly about the militarized CIA; I also think Brennan is a kind of good guy, though a kind of ridiculous one) what you need to do is lay out Wheeler’s references to the characters, and her links, and make them add up like Sherlock Holmes.
The reporter I was referring to in that quote was the AP reporter psyching out the motives of the leaker.
But to your point.
Marcy’s investigations rarely reach complete closure, always allowing for additional evidence. Case in point, she references back the fact that air marshals were flown to Europe at the beginning to the period and hypothesizes that an air marshal might have been the source of the media’s attitude that the White House was covering up a threat in its talk about safety. And also explains why there were 550 subjects of the investigation.
The important point about Benghazi is that the GOP seized on it to deflect from the Islamophobic video that circulated about the same time and that the media attributed as the reason for the demonstrations.
I agree that the Cheneyized militarized CIA is part of the story of the Benghazi attack, but it is also likely a retaliation for the assassination of al-Libi.
Furthermore, the responsibility for security decisions lay with the ambassador and the CIA station chief.
Reporters psych things all the time, that was pretty stupidly put on my part. What I was thinking about or should have been thinking about was the refusal to psych sources (of anti-Democrat and pro-Bush stenography
stories). The guys who fail to “suss out the motives of skilled DC players.”
Lewis Libby on Valerie Plame was not the world’s most sophisticated operation. What reporters did with that was willful disregard of inconvenient truth. Then it’s interesting to discuss their own motives; Are they simply rushing scoops into print to cope with the Age of the Internets, are they victims of flattery by Cheney and Libby?
The incoherence of political stories (like the casus belli for the Iraq war, say) is a function of their why they’re being told. I don’t mean to say Marcy doesn’t fight against that, I just think she’s more reporter than writer, as they say nowadays–the best reporter in the world. But it takes a writer to avoid Firebagging. I like very much what you do with Benghazi above, breaking it down into a set of unrelated false consciousnesses projected on a single matter.
You raise another issue. Media covering Washington see themselves as players instead of reporters. They self-consciously try to shape events instead of mererly reporting on them. They have agendas. And as I said elsewhere, the agenda of AP has not been to be even-handed in the reporting on this administration. In story after story, they are conservative stenographers if not Republican stenographers, reflective of the general Village tone.
There is a difference between knowing a source’s motives and knowing when a source is manipulating information. There is a difference between knowing a source’s’ motive and knowing a source’s commitments and personal history. The basic fact is that humans are not mind-readers when it comes to motive and judgements about motive are inferential and highly subject to error. That is the primary fallacy in firebagging–false certainty about the motives of the President. It is also the case here in which we do not know who the leaker actually is and how much history AP had with them as a source. It makes a great difference between the leaker being Petraeus and the leaker being an air marshal as to where the “gotcha” slant in the article originates–the reporter or the source.
You and many others are having an inordinate amount of difficulty understanding the press conference.
Let me walk you through this.
The AP agreed to delay publication for national security reasons, but they didn’t agree to spike it. They agreed to a few days.
The political side of it was that the White House was caught in a rather large-seeming lie. They had been taking credit for decimating al-Qaeda and assuring the public that they were no threats. And now the AP had a very troublesome story that they were going to publish that contradicted them on both points.
Meanwhile, the cell needed to be rolled up. Primarily, the leader of the cell and the bomb maker needed to be taken out. The got the former but not the latter. The informant needed to be extracted.
Once that was done, there was no more waiting. The AP wasn’t going to hold it forever.
The CIA wanted them to delay it one more day even though it wasn’t, according to them for operational reasons. I’m not sure what the reason was. Perhaps it was at the behest of the political folks who wanted to get their ducks in a row for the coming shitstorm. In any case, the CIA said that the security threat was over. They tried to cut a deal that the administration wouldn’t answer calls for an hour to no other news agencies could produce content to compete with the AP scoop. AP considered it, but the WH didn’t want to be muffled for more than five minutes, so they called off the deal before the AP could accept or reject it.
The press conference was not set up to brag about the operation but to triage the fallout of the story. They didn’t have their ducks in a row the day the article ran so they scheduled it for the next day.
The AP suggested that this press conference would have occurred even if they had not run the article, but that is not true. It’s true that they knew it was going to take place, but that was only because the administration knew that the AP was going to run the article.
Someone comes to you and says, “I have proof that the administration is lying about there being no threat from al-Qaeda. They didn’t decimate them. In fact, al-Qaeda almost blew up a plane last week with another underwear bomb.”
You say, “Holy Shit!! This is the biggest story of the campaign!!”
Then you go to the CIA for comment and they tell you that it’s true but that they can’t talk about it because they are still rolling up the cell.
How eager are you to publish under those circumstances? So, you agree to wait for a few days.
But do you write the story as if the administration lied for no good reason? Or do you emphasize that they lied had a very good reason, indeed?
So, yes, my main problem is with the slant of the reporting, which basically did the bidding of the source. And, by the time the wrote the article they should have known that their source was a piece of shit who undermined national security for political reasons and they should not have been eager to do their bidding.
The AP delayed the publication for a few days and the White House (communications operation) did not have its ducks in a row when AP had decided to publish. Is that what you are saying. And the AP refused to grant the courtesy of spiking the article to begin with and refused to give the White House first release of the news?
The CIA said it was not an operational issue, but the publication caused the failure to get the bombmaker.
So the whole style of the investigation is to be punitive on AP, treating them as a hostile witness. That seems to be what you are saying. AP depended on its CIA sources for clarity about when publication would not endanger national security, and those sources misled them.
The more you explain, the worse it seems. Did the CIA try to pwn AP with its negotiations?
Wow.
I am not saying that at all. Not at all. None of it.
You are attached like a leach to the publication of the article, which I am telling you is almost wholly irrelevant.
If I could get you to forget that the article was ever published, I would just do that because then maybe you could understand.
Think about it like this:
Pretend that at the last second, the AP just decided that they weren’t going to publish the article, and they didn’t. No one ever found out the plot. Brennan never had a teleconference. The press conference was cancelled.
Okay?
In that scenario ALL THE SAME DAMAGE WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE.
The only thing, and I mean the only thing that would have been different if the AP actually published the article is that the members of the cell that weren’t already alerted by the death of their leader, the disappearance of their bomb, and the sudden disappearance of the informant, would have known with certainty that they had been betrayed.
If the bomb maker got away due to the leak it is because the leak gave us only a narrow amount of time to locate him, and that he was possibly tipped off when our informant split. It had nothing to do with the actual publication. We had to get the informant out because of the article was going to be published, not because it had been. The Saudis and Brits were pissed long before the article was published. Every bad thing that happened, happened before publication and publication basically did nothing but reveal it to the public. The problems with publication were mainly political, because the White House didn’t want a headache in an election year. And the political problem is what the press conference was about. It’s what Brennan’s teleconference was about. Triage. Mitigation. Spin. Take away the political problem and there is no need for a press conference.
Publication didn’t cause the damage. The threat of publication, the certainty of imminent publication caused the damage. The leak caused the damage.
The leak caused the damage. The White House only knew about the leak because AP contacted the CIA for confirmation. Had the AP not contacted the CIA, what would have been the consequences?
The leak caused the damage.
The problems were mainly political.
But the search for the bombmaker if ongoing was operational was it not? So the CIA negotiator was not telling the truth when they said that the reason for the delay was not operational.
The real political damage from this will be the reliance on administrative subpoenas and the failure to get AP to voluntarily assist the investigation.
AP has operated with due diligence IMO.
DOJ has not. Failing to formalize recusal just provided an opening to Congressional inquiry, as did the use of administrative subpoenas, going after phone logs from the telecommunications providers, and notifying AP after the fact.
Instead of elaborate defenses of the justification of these actions, the administration really needs to walk it back with some major changes: formal letters of recusal, formal letters of delegation of powers and scope to the investigators (to address the perception that it is a fishing expedition), use of court warrants instead of administrative subpoenas, and beginning to roll back the para-Constitutional laws that have be implemented since World War II in the name of national security.
Notice that I did not defend the DOJ’s decisions about what to subpoena or who or when to inform or any of that. And, in this piece at least, I said nothing derogatory about the AP at all. I also didn’t defend drone strikes or targeted assassinations or our overall foreign policy.
All I did, really, was to say that I think Marcy and digby are wrong when they lay the blame at Brennan’s feet and when they speculate that the DOJ subpoenaed all that material to go looking for some other leaks that the one about the plot.
I forgot about your first question.
What if the AP had published without notifying the CIA?
The informant would have been killed and the cell would have scattered. Fahd al Quso would have lived. And it would be likely that a commercial airliner would go down sometime in the future.
So, it’s a good thing that they told the CIA.
The problems were mainly political.
No.
The leak caused the operation to be rolled up. The leak ended the asset’s ability to continue to screw with AQAP, and the CIA had to bring an effective operation that could have been continued to an end.
And that meant at least that the bomb-maker got away, along with who knows how much missed opportunity to rope in others.
BTW, this is the anniversary of when I awoke to find the muzzle of a Chicago cop’s automatic in my face, without a warrant, supposedly doing “counter-terrorism”.
If I’m a little passionate about civil liberties there is a clear reason. Too much security peacock strutting and not enough dealing with the real security threats. Too many false arrests that are forced through to conviction so as not to embarrass law enforcement or prosecutors–forced through intimidation and control of evidence.
I am fully cognizant of your run-in with the overeager security folks in this country and your legitimate reasons for skepticism about ALL official statements from the government.
After you reference to air marshals, I peeked over at emptywheel’s place and whoo boy!
She is really sloppy with what she is putting out. Has she been this reckless for a long time or is this a new thing?
She’s conflating the body cavity bomb threat/intel with the undiebomb threat/intel. They are not the same thing.
Just because we discover that a cell in Yemen is making an undiebomb that can evade metal detectors doesn’t preclude us from finding that another cell or even the same cell is contemplating body cavity bombs that can evade all detectors.
When the president learns of one threat it makes it more likely that there are others, not less.
Ordering air marshals on flights after we’ve defused a known threat is not a conspiracy to pretend that we haven’t defused a known threat.
Her last piece can only be described as terrible. She used to be very good.
This is a good justification for skepticism, not knee-jerk denialism.
Yes, now we have a concrete “other interest”: getting the bombmaker. Would the CIA have dropped that objective just because the AP was antsy to get its story out?
Here is what might have happened. (And this is pure speculation.) As one knows from movies about the mafia, when you want to kill several people connected to each other, you hit them all at the same time, so that none of them gets tipped off by the murder of another. The USG badly wanted to get al-Quso; he was connected with the Cole bombing and the State Deparment had offered 5 million dollars for information on him. Since the Obama administration’s preferred way of dealing with (Muslim) terrorists is to kill them in a drone strike, we can presume that it had been unsuccessful at tracking al-Quso down until he (presumably) met with the Saudi infiltrator. It was the infiltrator who gave the CIA the intelligence about al-Quso’s location. Now, one can imagine a scenario in which the CIA was able to track al-Quso with a drone, but not the bomb maker. The CIA/White House decide to kill al-Quso, even though they realize that there’s a good chance that that will make the bomb maker go into hiding. Thus, it was the drone strike on al-Quso (together with the infiltrator failing to bomb anything on May 2), not the publication of the AP story, that brought the infiltration operation to an end.
That’s actually a very plausible scenario that you’ve drawn.
You also should realize that the AP wasn’t going to spike the story and they were not going to hold it for very long.
If for some reason the CIA had decided to try to get them to hold it for a month arguing that the sensitive operation would take that long, I think the AP would have called bullshit. I don’t the CIA would even try to kill a story that way unless it was going to cause something on the level of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Well, thank you. 🙂
You’re probably right about the AP’s and CIA’s attitudes to further delaying the story.
The LA Times has an interesting story about this (as I learned from a comment to emptywheel’s latest post).
That confirms what I said before: not only did the mole get the new underwear bomb to Anglo-American intelligence, but he also provided the location of al-Quso.
Now, I don’t know how Muslim terrorists think, but I have read several John le Carré novels. Even if the remaining members of AQAP didn’t suspect the mole’s story about the bomb failing, that together with the drone attack on al-Quso, after al-Quso had effectively evaded the CIA for many years, would be too much for them. (A recent article about drone strikes noted how crucial human intelligence is for finding a target; AQAP are aware of that, no doubt.)
Anyway, I obviously don’t think anymore that Brennan did any damage with his “blabbing”, which is a line that emptywheel has been pushing.
Well, look at it this way.
Our intelligence guys may know that it’s likely our asset is in grave danger if he goes back, but he may not know it. What’s the CIA’s downside to sending him back? Basically nothing.
If he lives, he produces. If he dies, he was productive while he lasted.
That’s cold-blooded, but that’s how the spy business operates.
If he got away with the bomb because he was supposed to use it, then it would be possible to send him back with the argument that it didn’t detonate and he somehow didn’t arouse suspicion. There are a lot of stories that could be concocted to explain that.
Bottom line is that the guy we really want is the guy who is making bombs that are designed to defeat airport security. We’d gladly put an asset at unacceptable risk to get a chance at the bomb-maker.
Now you’re making the same kind of argument I made here, to which you responded: “I also like the way you blithely consign an asset to death because we do that ‘all the time.'”
Anyway, yes, I agree, the CIA could have tried to continue running the mole. (He was a British asset, and the Brits, being our lackeys, would probably have gone along with that, but I’m not sure he would have.) So in that regard, the AP story did do damage. (Yes, I’m more open to the idea now that the AP story is what did the damage, not so much Brennan’s additional revelation.) But chances are that when he went back, AQAP would have figured he was a mole. Who knows, they might even have tortured him to get information about how British intelligence runs their assets. So sending him back was not risk free, even before the AP story came out. (I hope I’m not being politically incorrect by suggesting that torture might work.)
Public indifference to the fate of intelligence assets is harmful to the recruitment of future assets.
That is a different issue than privately putting an asset in unacceptable danger.
that it didn’t detonate and he somehow didn’t arouse suspicion
Which would explain the testing to see if it would have set off airport security.
Tarheel, do you recognize the hypocrisy in simultaneously complaining about a “legal end run” and then proclaiming, “Once again, the press is under no obligation to do the government’s business no matter how much you or I would like that to happen.”
The press is under no legal obligation, so anything goes, but heaven forbid that anyone working to keep counter-terrorism activities “merely” upholds their obligations under the law.
I have a deep distrust of the honesty of those claiming to be working on counter-terrorism. I have a deep distrust of AP in reporting on this administration.
But there are ways that use to suffice in American government for sorting that out. Ways that in the name of expediency are being bypassed.
Completely OT rant to follow, but damn if it just pissed me off.
Obama’s Katrina Moment
As a NOLA native and Katrina survivor, I have all kinds of words that no lady should be comfortable saying in my head, but I won’t post that here.
Suffice it to say but people I hold near and dear to me DIED and the way of life of my family and my city and my neighbohood (I was born and raised in the 9th ward ya know the hardest hit by Katrina) was lost and way more than the 4 people in Benghazi (may they RIP) died.
Unless I missed it, non of those “targeted” Tea Party groups lives and homes and family property was washed away and made to wait years (and some are still waiting BTW) for Bush’s FEMA org to get it’s freakin’ act together. And unless Imissed it, the AP/Press didn’t have people who were supposed to be protecting the citizenry of NOLA, but instead were shooting down people like dogs, as they were leaving the grocery store in their neighborhood.
Obama’s Katrina…REALLY!
I thought the oil spill was supposed to be his Katrina moment?
Wow, the comparison is BS and insulting–beyond insulting.
I’m so sorry that your family and community suffered and continue to. It is absolutely heartbreaking.
good post, BooMan
…you’ve pretty much lost the political argument.
Mark Fiore: “Snuggly the Security Bear” (billmoyers.com)
In my opinion, this is President Obama’s Tet Offensive moment about the various para-Constitutional laws that are supposed to keep us safe but seem never to really do so. If he responds like LBJ did (cut and run) it will leave the Democratic Party a shambles. If he responds like Richard Nixon did (double down on a security state), it will leave Constitutional guarantees of freedoms further in jeopardy.
It’s time to return to normal Constitutional government and cut out this security state bullcrap just to show to the GOP that he is tough of national security. The GOP will never believe any Democrat is tough on national security; that is rhetorically not possible for them.
Do you really think there’s any chance that Obama or any future Dem nominee will do that?
History is funny. Just when you think nothing will change, suddenly almost everything appears to change, and sometimes does really change.
Another way of saying that my crystal ball is broken when it comes to this matter.
…because preventing al Qaeda attacks is, of course, “bullcrap.”
Once you’ve internalized that piece of nonsense, it becomes very easy to dismiss anything done to prevent mass murder attacks against Americans as useless at best, and cover for something nefarious at worst.
Wars are politics by other means. It seems the the US national security establishment keeps forgetting that.
And yes, there has been too much corrupt dealing in the so-called global war on terror over the past 13 years. Was there really an anticipated attack on the US or was the assassination of the “leader” a side deal with the Yemeni government?
What I see are bloated budgets and no accountability. Just repeated assertions to “Trust us. We know what we are doing.”
Preventing al Quaeda attacks is not bullcrap. But much of what the bloated national security-homeland security state does is. And it continues to encourage rampant Islamaphobia and discrimination. And further curtailment of civil liberties.
It’s nothing new. Just an escalation. This same level of stuff went on for 50 years with the “threat” from the “Reds”. Insane CIA plots were carried out in the various third world countries (cough Nicaragua, Chile, Iran in the 50’s cough), democratically elected left-leaning govts. overthrown, fascist dictatorships enabled, socialist candidates in African politics assassinated, “Commie sympathisers” witch-hunted in this country, etc. etc.
It took 9/11 however, to bring it to a new level, to wreak havoc on OUR constitutional rights, and it was done without a single objection from the Teabagger right, and I don’t remember a big opposition from our Dem Congresscritters, either.
Preventing al Quaeda attacks is not bullcrap. But much of what the bloated national security-homeland security state does is.
This should not be an excuse to ignore the available evidence and jam everything into an unalterable narrative.
When you’ve lost Mark Fiore and Bill Moyers…you’ve pretty much lost the political argument.
This is quite possibly the worst political advice I’ve ever seen.
Mark Fiore. Bill Moyers.
The heartbeats of middle America.
Tet Offensive? LBJ? Nixon?
The “security state bullcrap” exists “just to show the GOP that he is tough?” You’re laying this all at his feet, filtered through metaphors referencing politics from 40-50 years ago? Yet you want him to abandon it, although you seem to believe “cut and run” would seriously damage the Democrats, which could only be to the benefit of the other party, who would “double down on a security state.” Why else would the President try to prove to Republicans that he’s “tough of[sic] national security?”
Look, I love Bill Moyers, too, but if anything’s seriously damaged here, it’s your line of reasoning. Of course, when you’re not capable of viewing this moment in the context of this President, but instead rely on tired political cliches from half a century ago, I can’t say I’m surprised. You want this to be a Nixon moment or an LBJ moment. You want this to be the worst sort of scandal that can happen. Why else elevate it to Nixon? Right? That’s not an unfair observation. But so long as you see our contemporary politics through such a trite, exhausted lens, you and others on the left will continue to misinterpret events according to pet issues and engage in useless political activities that, in the long term, cause the left in this country far more damage than you seem capable of realizing in the heat of the moment.
You really want the President to be an LBJ or a Nixon? You want your antiquated understanding of politics to play out like that? Because you will be so much further away from anything you want politically than you could imagine right now.
I don’t see why this would be a problem since, as we all know, it’s a targeted killing program. Which is a totally different thing from assassination. Those Brits need to learn to stop worrying and love the drone.
You have no way of proving anything. Neither does Marcy Wheeler. You’re both (and anyone else theorizing on the matter) irrelevant peons writing fanfiction online, fantasizing about a life of power and intrigues that is not your own.
Yes that semantic protection cloak does do the trick, doesn’t it?
I don’t see why this would be a problem since, as we all know, it’s a targeted killing program.
The UK has not declared war against al Qaeda. The US has.
Obscure legal doctrine time: as it turns out, declaring war is an action that has legal significance.
The problem is that people like Marcy Wheeler think that going after al Qaeda is inherently inappropriate, and that nobody could really consider that goal to be a legitimate goal that they would base their decisions around.
Therefore, there’s just gotta be some other explanation, and any claim that that really is the intent and motivation can only be a cover for something else – so when you see that justification offered, you don’t have to consider whether it is true, and can leap immediately to figuring out what the “real” story that this obvious pretext is hiding.
Of course, people in the intelligence, military, and political communities actually do think that going after al Qaeda is a good idea, and actually do base their decisions and actions around accomplishing that goal.
David Kravets of Wired:
We Don’t Need No Stinking Warrant: The Disturbing, Unchecked Rise of the Administrative Subpoena
War without end.
Charlie Savage, NYT: Debating the Legal Basis for the War on Terror
Right, sorry. I mean May 2, when CIA reached peak defensiveness in briefing the AP for the May 7 story.
Double sorry, this was supposed to reply to Alexander up at 11:02.