Tipping off al Qaida

U.S. officials said this week that an intelligence leak about an al Qaida plot has undermined their ability to monitor the terrorist group. In August, the U.S. intercepted Internet messages between terrorist leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and the group’s Yemen branch about an imminent terrorist attack, leading to the brief closure of 17 U.S. embassies. The New York Times said it held back details of the story out of national security concerns, only publishing them after McClatchy newspapers did so. U.S. officials told the Times that there has since been an abrupt drop in communications through the channel that Zawahiri used. The resulting loss of intelligence is greater, the unnamed sources said, than the impact of the thousands of government documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“It is pretty rich” for the Times to blame a rival for this breach, said Max Boot in Commentary. The Times first reported on the plot chatter; McClatchy merely added a few names. Yet somehow now that the channel has dried up, it’s all McClatchy’s fault. In truth, the Times “has done as much as any media outlet to publish government secrets that can be of use to our enemies.”

This is all just government spin, said Dashiell Bennett in TheAtlantic.com. The original leak about the foiled plot was intended to reassure Americans that the government is protecting them. Now we hear that our intelligence has been harmed by news stories. The message is clear: “We can’t do our job unless everyone keeps their mouth shut.” That, of course, is what government officials always say.

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It wasn’t the press that hurt U.S. intelligence gathering in this instance, said Robert Scheer in The Nation. It was leakers in the Obama administration. Yet I can assure you that those officials “will not be prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act.” Snowden, on the other hand, whose leaks about American tapping of foreign allies’ phones didn’t hurt national security but did embarrass the U.S., is being relentlessly pursued. Surely what does the most harm to America is that double standard.