Leaks
[Recent updates:
2006-07-02:
Added 2006-06-23-NYT,
the NYT’s exposure of the Swift banking surveillance program,
and 2006-06-25-Keller, Bill Keller’s letter defending the exposure.
2006-06-20:
Added 2006-06-11-Kaiser,
a defense by the Washington Post’s Robert G. Kaiser
of the media's publication of classified information,
with extensive comments (by the author of this blog) on his arguments.
2006-05-31:
Added 1950-18USC-798
and two blog entries discussing its applicability,
2006-01-06-Johnson and 2006-01-06-Joyner.
2006-02-01:
Extensive comments have been added to the full-text articles
2005-12-22-Washington-Post and
2005-12-23-Washington-Post.]
This report has three parts.
related to
so much of what is being said
regarding the prevalence and criticality of leaks regarding national security,
especially by the evil Washington Post,
is flagrantly untrue.
(Are they stupid or just congenital liars?
They’re the ones who “cherrypicked”
so much of the prewar information environment—
for example, as pointed out here.)
Material that, on the face of it,
should be classified as SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information),
unless definitively proved otherwise,
is highlighted in red.
My comments, when within quoted text,
appear in this color.
Each item in the chronology begins with a header in this color.
The contents of the header is a tag that can be used to directly address that item,
e.g.,
the first item could be accessed by entering
#1998-08-07-AQ-bomb
as a URL,
either directly in a browser or embedded in an <a href="..."> HTML tag.
1998-08-17-WP (SCI)
1998-08-20-US-bomb
1998-08-21-WT
1998-08-23-WT (SCI)
1998-08-24-WT (SCI)
2004-Sch-IH
2004-9-11-Comm
2005-12-19-Bush-PC
2005-12-20-WP
2005-12-20-NYT
2005-12-20-Benj
2005-12-21-WT
2005-12-22-WP
2005-12-23-WP
2006-01-06-Joyner
2006-02-12-NYT
2006-06-11-Kaiser
2006-06-23-NYT
2006-06-25-Keller
Title 18, Section 798 of the United States Code.
“Suspect Links Embassy Blast To Saudi Exile”
by Pamela Constable and Kamran Kahn,
which contained:
on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan thought to be related to al Qaeda.
Terrorist is driven by hatred for U.S., Israel,
including this statement (emphasis added):
and which was (perhaps as a consequence) cited by the White House
to back up President Bush’s news conference statement,
and which the WP and many other media outlets
have taken great delight in pointing out
was not the product of a leak.
But just because that one statement wasn’t necessarily due to a leak
hardly means that leaks did not occur,
and did not destroy carefully constructed and nationally vital sources and methods.
Read on for examples.
Bin Laden's several links to terrorist units known,
including these statements (emphasis added):
UNNAMED MISSION Last week's U.S. retaliatory strikes,
which included this paragraph (emphasis added):
which on page 261 contains (emphasis is added):
to the first, hard-back, edition of The Age of Sacred Terror
contains 14 references to the Washington Post but,
despite the above,
none to the Washington Times, satellite phone, or even just phone.
Although much attention has been paid to that passage after it appeared,
it would appear that the authors
didn’t consider it that significant at the time of writing.
Imperial Hubris:
Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror.
Its Chapter 6, Section 4, subtly titled “Leaks: Hubris or Treason?”,
was a seven-page fiery, impassioned critique
of the prevailing culture of leaking in Washington,
a culture abetted and condoned by the powerful,
politicians and media both.
Scheuer had the right, the background, and the knowledge
to make such a critique,
having spent 20-plus years working at the CIA,
three years of which (1996–1999) were spent heading
the CIA’s unit assigned and dedicated
to watching, tracking, and analyzing the activities of bin Laden and al Qaeda,
and having watched the best work of America’s intelligence community
being sabotaged (“undermined” is far too weak a word) by leakers.
Who in Washington has a better perch to speak of the damage that leaks can cause?
At any rate, IH Section 6.4 contains the following paragraph,
combining passion, wisdom, and love for America,
a paragraph which, of course,
has been ignored by the craven editors of the media
(emphasis and links have been added):
It is mind-boggling that the editors of the Washington Post
(not to mention those of the New York Times and Washington Times)
have systematically ignored the information in this paragraph
in their subsequent coverage of leaks, and
in their campaign to mock the Bush administration’s efforts
to fight the climate of leaking
which Scheuer has so wisely and passionately warned against.
One might ask why Scheuer’s warning
has been so systematically ignored by the elite media.
Any answer, by other than the editors of the elite media themselves,
is of course speculation.
Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that Scheuer has been subjected to
a campaign of vituperation and insult from certain quarters of America’s elite.
As examples, note
In 1986, William Casey, then the director of central intelligence, threatened The Post with legal action if we disclosed an intelligence-gathering operation code-named Ivy Bells. "There's no way you can run that story without endangering the national security," Casey ominously warned Ben Bradlee, The Post's executive editor at the time. But it turned out that when Casey issued this warning, the Soviet Union had already learned about Ivy Bells from its spy Ronald Pelton; because of Pelton, the Soviets had captured the hardware that had allowed the United States to listen to Soviet naval communications. So in reality we proposed to publish old news. But Casey had intimidated us; even after learning that the Soviets knew the secret, we equivocated for weeks. Finally, NBC News scooped us on our own story, then we published our version. As the editor supervising preparation of the story, I was humiliated; I also learned a good lesson. [This is disingenuous in the extreme. In the first place, even if we knew that the Soviet Union knew about our intelligence operation, it may be disadvantageous to let the Soviet Union know that we knew that they knew. In intelligence matters, invariably, the less said, the better, unless the intent is to deliberately disinform the enemy. In the second place, just because the Soviet Union knew that we had the capability implemented by Ivy Bells doesn’t mean that other nations knew. The capability might be useful against those other nations. Why broadcast to the whole world that we had that capability? It is unbelievable that the Post is unable to see that last point. Shame on them.]
Secrecy and security are not the same. On this point, Exhibit A for journalists here at The Post is the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. [There is an important point of logic that Kaiser glosses over. Just because secrecy and security are not always the same does not mean that they are never the same. No matter how many examples the media may trot out where material was overclassified, that does not mean that the media may or should function as a de facto declassification board, with each editor being free to declassify anything that comes into his ambit.]
I want to add, immodestly, that The Post's record on stories of this kind is good. I don't know of a single case when the paper had to retract or correct an important story containing classified information. Nor do I know of a case when we compromised a secret government program, or put someone's life in danger, or gave an enemy significant assistance. [In total contradiction, Michael Scheuer has said “Unavoidably, [the Post’s actions] will weaken America against al Qaeda and result in more dead Americans.” ]
Robert G. Kaiser is an associate editor of The Washington Post. He served as the paper's managing editor from 1991 to 1998.
Bush made his assertion at a news conference Monday, in which he defended his authorization of warrantless monitoring of communications between some U.S. citizens and suspected terrorists overseas. He fumed that "the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak." He berated the media for "revealing sources, methods and what we use the information for" and thus helping "the enemy" change its operations. [Again, Bush was right on.] White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that the president was referring to an article that appeared in the Washington Times on Aug. 21, 1998, the day after the cruise missile attack, which was launched in retaliation for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa two weeks earlier. The Sept. 11 commission also cited the article as "a leak" that prompted bin Laden to stop using his satellite phone, though it noted that he had added more bodyguards and began moving his sleeping place "frequently and unpredictably" after the missile attack. Two former Clinton administration officials first fingered the Times article in a 2002 book, "The Age of Sacred Terror." Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote that after the "unabashed right-wing newspaper" published the story, bin Laden "stopped using the satellite phone instantly" and "the United States lost its best chance to find him." The article, a profile of bin Laden, buried the information about his satellite phone in the 21st paragraph. It never said that the United States was listening in on bin Laden, as the president alleged. The writer, Martin Sieff, said yesterday that the information about the phone was "already in the public domain" when he wrote the story.
A search of media databases shows that [1] Time magazine had first reported on Dec. 16, 1996, that bin Laden "uses satellite phones to contact fellow Islamic militants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa." Taliban officials provided the information, with one official -- security chief Mulla Abdul Mannan Niazi -- telling Time, "He's in high spirits." The day before the Washington Times article was published -- and the day of the attacks [1998-08-20] -- [2] CNN producer Peter Bergen appeared on the network to talk about an interview he had with bin Laden in 1997. "He communicates by satellite phone, even though Afghanistan in some levels is back in the Middle Ages and a country that barely functions," Bergen said. Bergen noted that as early as 1997, bin Laden's men were very concerned about electronic surveillance. "They scanned us electronically," he said, because they were worried that anyone meeting with bin Laden "might have some tracking device from some intelligence agency." In 1996, the Chechen insurgent leader Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed by a Russian missile that locked in to his satellite phone signal. [If this is what tipped al Qaeda off, why did they not stop using that phone in 1996, rather than continue using it until 1998 when the articles specifying U.S. intelligence methods appeared?] That same day, [3] CBS reported that bin Laden used a satellite phone to give a television interview. [4] USA Today ran a profile of bin Laden on the same day as the Washington Times's article, quoting a former U.S. official about his "fondness for his cell phone." It was not until Sept. 7, 1998 -- after bin Laden apparently stopped using his phone -- that a newspaper reported that the United States had intercepted his phone calls and obtained his voiceprint. U.S. authorities "used their communications intercept capacity to pick up calls placed by bin Laden on his Inmarsat satellite phone, despite his apparent use of electronic 'scramblers,' " the [5] Los Angeles Times reported. [See my remarks above for a discussion of this paragraph. More generally, it seems remarkable that the WP ’s search of media databases turned up four references to the use of the satellite phone that weren’t leaks, one reference that clearly was based on a leak but which appeared after bin Laden ceased use of the satellite phone, but not the three references to communications intercepts that clearly were leaks and appeared before, or contemporaneous with, his behavior change. Perhaps the WP ’s editors were hung up on the term “satellite phone.” But the substance of Bush’s complaint was about the leaking of our ability to intercept bin Laden’s communications, and the fact (as I have noted repeatedly) that such leaking had been done should surely have been well-known to the WP ’s editors and reporters dealing with national security.]
Officials could not explain yesterday why they focused on the Washington Times story when other news organizations at the same time reported on the satellite phone -- and that the information was not particularly newsworthy. "You got me," said Benjamin, who was director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff at the time. "That was the understanding in the White House and the intelligence community. The story ran and the lights went out." [My guess, and it is only a guess, is that here is where things went wrong. Benjamin somehow misunderstood what the IC was telling him (surely the IC was aware of and concerned about the other leaks), and so only reported the one non-leak in his book. That version then passed into Washington’s consciousness. But what is still puzzling is why the IC couldn’t lay the real problems on the table to the 9-11 commission (see next paragraph). This cries out for investigation and disclosure.] Lee H. Hamilton, vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, gave a speech in October in which he said the leak "was terribly damaging." Yesterday, he said the commission relied on the testimony of three "very responsible, very senior intelligence officers," [see the endnote to the 9-11 commission report] who he said "linked the Times story to the cessation of the use of the phone." He said they described it as a very serious leak. But Hamilton said he did not recall any discussion about other news outlets' reports. "I cannot conceive we would have singled out the Washington Times if we knew about all of the reporting," he said. [Again, this breakdown in communication between the IC and the 9-11 commission cries out for investigation and explanation. It is remarkable that the media can place so much faith in the results of the 9-11 commission when they want to, when in cases such as this, as well as the Able Danger situation, the 9-11 commission missed so much. Note also Scheuer’s condemnation of the work of the three committees.]
[Now for the key fact regarding the significance of the leaks:] A White House official said last night the administration was confident that press reports changed bin Laden's behavior. CIA spokesman Tom Crispell declined to comment, saying the question involves intelligence sources and methods.
[6.4.1] Leaking classified intelligence to journalists, even the most highly classified, has long been common among senior U.S. government officials, politicians, civil servents, and senior military officers. From the vantage point of the author’s career, there has been a marked acceleration in such leaking over the past decade, with the Washington Times being the leading acquirer of such data from its obviously high-level [why is this obvious?] federal government contacts. That it does so whether the administration is Republican or Democratic, moreover, suggests it has strong ties to senior civil servants and military officers immune to electoral vagaries—and, apparently, the tug of conscience. Beyond the growing volume of leaks, there has been a sharp increase in leaking data that has no clear purpose in terms of shaping U.S. domestic or foreign policies but seems rather a form of bragging to the world and the enemy about what we know and how we know it.
[6.4.2] Overall, there is an accelerating tendency to leak for leaking’s sake, spurred by motives ranging from
[6.4.3] Leaks are a major factor limiting the effectiveness of U.S. efforts to defeat Osama bin Laden, et al. The first serious leak about al Qaeda was in the Washington Times after the [1998-08-20] U.S. cruise missile attack on al Qaeda camps near Khowst, Afghanistan. The attack was in response to the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania thirteen days earlier. In the [1998-08-24] Times article, “senior” U.S. Department of Defense officials revealed that precise U.S. targeting of the camps was based on electronically intercepting bin Laden’s conversations. “In the two weeks following the Aug. 7 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,” Ernest Blazar wrote in his “Inside the Ring” column, “the United States reaped an intelligence bonanza from intercepted terrorists’ radio and telephone calls.” The senior leaders told Blazar they had not leaked sooner because “it was hoped that terrorists would again use their compromised networks to rally in the wake of the Tomahawk [cruise missile] attacks. Said one U.S. official: ‘We want to see who is still using the same cell phone numbers.’ ” Apparently these genius leakers had decided it was time to make sure the terrorists would not use the phone again. Well, as night follows day, the intelligence community lost this priceless advantage when bin Laden and his men stopped using the phones.
This leak, moreover,
initiated a series of al Qaeda leaks that remains in full spate.
[6.4.4]
Because of such dastardly leaks,
the United States cannot fully exploit
its clandestine service’s numerous, often astounding
captures of senior al Qaeda fighters.
From the capture of Abu Zubaydah in 2002-03
to that of Khalid bin Attash in 2003-03,
word of the arrests has been leaked by senior U.S. officials
within days, and often hours, of their occurrence.
In part, the leaks are simply more evidence
of the rivalry raging among the main components of the U.S. intelligence community,
each trying to win the lead role in the anti-al Qaeda war
and, with it, the largest cut of swag from the ever-growing terrorism budget.
Based on my experience working against bin Laden for almost a decade,
I can say with confidence that
the most damaging leaks about al Qaeda
come from the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the White House.
[How does Scheuer know this?]
A reliable rule of thumb for the reader is that
the federal agencies who have done least to protect America from al Qaeda
leak the most to take credit for other’ work and disguise their years of failure.
Indeed, when a history of the U.S. war with bin Laden is written,
Americans will learn not only that
their clandestine service scored all the major victories against al Qaeda,
but that it did so in an environment
where other intelligence-community agencies withheld support
and were deliberately obstructive.
The country-be-damned leaks by these agencies
are meant to deny credit to the clandestine service,
which neither defends itself nor notes its successes in public.
[6.4.5]
More dangerous than intra-bureaucracy war, however,
is the obtuseness of our elites.
The greatest single motivation behind the flood of leaks, I would contend, is
the inability of U.S. leaders—political, military, intelligence, and diplomatic—
and much of the country’s academic and media elites
to give bin Laden’s threat steady, serious attention.
[I don’t see the connection here.]
Yes, there have been huge increases in counterterrorism funding.
Yes, there has been dramatic growth
in technical and human collection against al Qaeda and its allies.
Yes, the number of people working on terrorism has been greatly augmented,
though the augmentees are inexperienced and will be of little use for years
until they learn the issues from a small corps of nearly worn-out veterans.
Yes, America’s leaders talk stridently of fighting the “war on terrorism”
and defeating the “devastating” threat al Qaeda poses to the “Homeland.”
Yes, the Department of Justice is taking protective domestic actions,
ones that sadly appear to restrict some civil liberties
in the name of national security.
[6.4.6]
The potential of the new resources, people, laws, and supportive rhetoric
given to the intelligence community is, unfortunately,
being sapped in a losing battle against Washington’s corps of leakers.
Notwithstanding improved intelligence and the clandestine service’s heroics,
the media landscape is still littered by classified disclosures.
Senior U.S. officials, for example,
The list could go on and fill a chapter of its own.
With each leak our post-09-11 effort against al Qaeda is undercut, and
the viability of the most lethal current threat to U.S. national security
is prolonged.
[6.4.7]
Then there is Bob Woodward’s book, Bush at War,
which saps the faith of intelligence officers
in the integrity of their leaders and institutions.
A newly hired U.S. intelligence officer
is inculcated with many beliefs peculiar to his trade.
Prominent among them is one that identifies the media as the enemy,
miscreants who ferret out and publish secrets,
thereby compromising sources and methods and risking lives of assets.
“[Journalists] are the world’s gossips,”
General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote in 1875,
“and gradually drift to the headquarters of some general
who finds it easier to make a reputation at home
than with his own corps or division.
They are also tempted to prophesy events and state facts
which, to an enemy, reveal a purpose in time to guard against it.”
Sherman’s view permeates the lesson taught to new intelligence officers,
and in my case held sway until recently.
For me, however,
a steady erosion in this view began with
the leak of the U.S. ability
to intercept bin Laden’s electronic communications.
As similar leaks multiplied over the last years, I came to wonder
who is the real culprit,
the publisher of the secret or its leaker?
While I still think editors of major U.S. publications
ought to do more self-censoring in terms of publishing classified data,
I am no longer undecided about the enemy.
Mr. Woodward’s book unarguably documents that
the leaker, not the journalist, is the true enemy of U.S. security.
Note, for example, his breezy description of the source base for his book,
a statement so smoothly matter-of-fact
that one tends to forget that those who gave him the information
wantonly broke federal law
and, to use old-fashioned terms,
betrayed a trust and sullied their honor by endangering
human and technical sources,
the intelligence officers handling the assets, and
America’s security.
Woodward explained in his introductory note:
[6.4.8]
After reading Mr. Woodward’s Bush at War,
it seems to me that the U.S. officials who either approved or participated in passing the information—in documents or via interviews—that is at the heart of Mr. Woodward’s book
gave an untold measure of aid and comfort to the enemy.
The pages of Bush at War are larded with items that appear to be either
classified intelligence information or
the means of collecting the data,
including, for starters, the following half-dozen:
[6.4.9]
Hubris, arrogance, and semantics are, I think,
the reasons for these and most leaks about bin Laden and al Qaeda,
although in Bush at War,
at least one leaker traded classified data
for the chance to have Mr. Woodward unwittingly rewrite
the “facts” about the U.S. government’s pre-09-11 bin Laden-related activities.
Hubris because U.S. officials appear to believe that
America is so superior to our foes that
leaking sensitive data and compromising sources and methods
for political or other reasons will either
escape the enemy’s notice—fat chance—or
that we will simply find a new way to acquire the data lost
when leaks shut the tap.
And because our elites are so full of themselves, they
a polyglot bunch of Arabs wearing robes, sporting scraggily beards,
and squatting around campfires in Afghan deserts and mountains
could pose a mortal threat to the United States.
The elites and other Americans, in the words of the Economist,
“still seem to treat the [09-11] attacks as if they were a single, dreadful event,
like a natural disaster, or a random crime committed against America....”
While covering their behinds with warnings of worse al Qaeda attacks to come,
their disbelief in the threat is marked by
[6.4.10 is omitted]
[6.4.11 partial]
[T]here can be only two definitions of leakers.
They are either
the latter should be prosecuted to the extent the law allows.
by Sara A. Carter
Washington Examiner, 2012-06-11
NSA’s targeting of Israeli leaders
swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers
By Adam Entous and Danny Yadron
Wall Street Journal, 2015-12-30 (in WSJ Washington print edition, page A1)
President Barack Obama announced two years ago he would curtail eavesdropping on friendly heads of state after the world learned the reach of long-secret U.S. surveillance programs.
But behind the scenes, the White House decided to keep certain allies under close watch, current and former U.S. officials said. Topping the list was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The U.S., pursuing a nuclear arms agreement with Iran at the time, captured communications between Mr. Netanyahu and his aides that inflamed mistrust between the two countries and planted a political minefield at home when Mr. Netanyahu later took his campaign against the deal to Capitol Hill.
The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears—an “Oh-s— moment,” one senior U.S. official said—that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.
White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
Stepped-up NSA eavesdropping revealed to the White House how Mr. Netanyahu and his advisers had leaked details of the U.S.-Iran negotiations—learned through Israeli spying operations—to undermine the talks; coordinated talking points with Jewish-American groups against the deal; and asked undecided lawmakers what it would take to win their votes, according to current and former officials familiar with the intercepts.
Before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed much of the agency’s spying operations in 2013, there was little worry in the administration about the monitoring of friendly heads of state because it was such a closely held secret. After the revelations and a White House review, Mr. Obama announced in a January 2014 speech he would curb such eavesdropping.
In closed-door debate, the Obama administration weighed which allied leaders belonged on a so-called protected list, shielding them from NSA snooping. French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders made the list, but the administration permitted the NSA to target the leaders’ top advisers, current and former U.S. officials said. Other allies were excluded from the protected list, including Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of NATO ally Turkey, which allowed the NSA to spy on their communications at the discretion of top officials.
Privately, Mr. Obama maintained the monitoring of Mr. Netanyahu on the grounds that it served a “compelling national security purpose,” according to current and former U.S. officials. Mr. Obama mentioned the exception in his speech but kept secret the leaders it would apply to.
Israeli, German and French government officials declined to comment on NSA activities. Turkish officials didn’t respond to requests Tuesday for comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the NSA declined to comment on communications provided to the White House.
This account, stretching over two terms of the Obama administration,
is based on
interviews with more than two dozen
current and former U.S. intelligence and administration officials
and
reveals for the first time the extent of American spying on the Israeli prime minister.
[My comment:
Why on earth would those U.S. officials want to reveal this,
unless their goal was to stop future such surveillance activities?
In other words, the officials who revealed this are traitors,
helping Israel and hurting the United States.]
Taking office
After Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials gave his national-security team a one-page questionnaire on priorities. Included on the form was a box directing intelligence agencies to focus on “leadership intentions,” a category that relies on electronic spying to monitor world leaders.
The NSA was so proficient at monitoring heads of state that it was common for the agency to deliver a visiting leader’s talking points to the president in advance. “Who’s going to look at that box and say, ‘No, I don’t want to know what world leaders are saying,’ ” a former Obama administration official said.
In early intelligence briefings, Mr. Obama and his top advisers were told what U.S. spy agencies thought of world leaders, including Mr. Netanyahu, who at the time headed the opposition Likud party.
Michael Hayden, who led the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency during the George W. Bush administration, described the intelligence relationship between the U.S. and Israel as “the most combustible mixture of intimacy and caution that we have.”
The NSA helped Israel expand its electronic spy apparatus—known as signals intelligence—in the late 1970s. The arrangement gave Israel access to the communications of its regional enemies, information shared with the U.S. Israel’s spy chiefs later suspected the NSA was tapping into their systems.
When Mr. Obama took office, the NSA and its Israeli counterpart, Unit 8200, worked together against shared threats, including a campaign to sabotage centrifuges for Iran’s nuclear program. At the same time, the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies targeted one another, stoking tensions.
“Intelligence professionals have a saying: There are no friendly intelligence services,” said Mike Rogers, former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Early in the Obama presidency, for example, Unit 8200 gave the NSA a hacking tool the NSA later discovered also told Israel how the Americans used it. It wasn’t the only time the NSA caught Unit 8200 poking around restricted U.S. networks. Israel would say intrusions were accidental, one former U.S. official said, and the NSA would respond, “Don’t worry. We make mistakes, too.”
In 2011 and 2012, the aims of Messrs. Netanyahu and Obama diverged over Iran. Mr. Netanyahu prepared for a possible strike against an Iranian nuclear facility, as Mr. Obama pursued secret talks with Tehran without telling Israel.
Convinced Mr. Netanyahu would attack Iran without warning the White House, U.S. spy agencies ramped up their surveillance, with the assent of Democratic and Republican lawmakers serving on congressional intelligence committees.
By 2013, U.S. intelligence agencies determined Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t going to strike Iran. But they had another reason to keep watch. The White House wanted to know if Israel had learned of the secret negotiations. U.S. officials feared Iran would bolt the talks and pursue an atomic bomb if news leaked.
The NSA had, in some cases, spent decades placing electronic implants in networks around the world to collect phone calls, text messages and emails. Removing them or turning them off in the wake of the Snowden revelations would make it difficult, if not impossible, to re-establish access in the future, U.S. intelligence officials warned the White House.
Instead of removing the implants, Mr. Obama decided to shut off the NSA’s monitoring of phone numbers and email addresses of certain allied leaders—a move that could be reversed by the president or his successor.
There was little debate over Israel. “Going dark on Bibi? Of course we wouldn’t do that,” a senior U.S. official said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname.
One tool was a cyber implant in Israeli networks that gave the NSA access to communications within the Israeli prime minister’s office.
[Again, why on earth, why in God's name,
would a loyal U.S. citizen reveal the existence of such an implant, if it exists?
If it does, and if they have revealed it,
this information surely gives Israel the knowledge and incentive to find the implant and remove it,
or even worse,
use it to send disinformation and misinformation back to the U.S.
In either case,
there can be no clearer example of revealing "sources and methods",
the revealing of which is prima facie treason.]
Given the appetite for information about Mr. Netanyahu’s intentions during the U.S.-Iran negotiations, the NSA tried to send updates to U.S. policy makers quickly, often in less than six hours after a notable communication was intercepted, a former official said.
Emerging deal
NSA intercepts convinced the White House last year that Israel was spying on negotiations under way in Europe. Israeli officials later denied targeting U.S. negotiators, saying they had won access to U.S. positions by spying only on the Iranians.
By late 2014, White House officials knew Mr. Netanyahu wanted to block the emerging nuclear deal but didn’t know how.
On Jan. 8, John Boehner, then the Republican House Speaker, and incoming Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed on a plan. They would invite Mr. Netanyahu to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress. A day later, Mr. Boehner called Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador, to get Mr. Netanyahu’s agreement.
Despite NSA surveillance, Obama administration officials said they were caught off guard when Mr. Boehner announced the invitation on Jan. 21.
Soon after, Israel’s lobbying campaign against the deal went into full swing on Capitol Hill, and it didn’t take long for administration and intelligence officials to realize the NSA was sweeping up the content of conversations with lawmakers.
The message to the NSA from the White House amounted to: “You decide” what to deliver, a former intelligence official said.
NSA rules governing intercepted communications “to, from or about” Americans date back to the Cold War and require obscuring the identities of U.S. individuals and U.S. corporations. An American is identified only as a “U.S. person” in intelligence reports; a U.S. corporation is identified only as a “U.S. organization.” Senior U.S. officials can ask for names if needed to understand the intelligence information.
The rules were tightened in the early 1990s to require that intelligence agencies inform congressional committees when a lawmaker’s name was revealed to the executive branch in summaries of intercepted communications.
A 2011 NSA directive said direct communications between foreign intelligence targets and members of Congress should be destroyed when they are intercepted. But the NSA director can issue a waiver if he determines the communications contain “significant foreign intelligence.”
The NSA has leeway to collect and disseminate intercepted communications involving U.S. lawmakers if, for example, foreign ambassadors send messages to their foreign ministries that recount their private meetings or phone calls with members of Congress, current and former officials said.
“Either way, we got the same information,” a former official said, citing detailed reports prepared by the Israelis after exchanges with lawmakers.
During Israel’s lobbying campaign in the months before the deal cleared Congress in September, the NSA removed the names of lawmakers from intelligence reports and weeded out personal information. The agency kept out “trash talk,” officials said, such as personal attacks on the executive branch.
Administration and intelligence officials said the White House didn’t ask the NSA to identify any lawmakers during this period.
“From what I can tell, we haven’t had a problem with how incidental collection has been handled concerning lawmakers,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He declined to comment on any specific communications between lawmakers and Israel.
The NSA reports allowed administration officials to peer inside
Israeli efforts to turn Congress against the deal.
Mr. Dermer was described as coaching unnamed U.S. organizations—
which officials could tell from the context were Jewish-American groups—
on lines of argument to use with lawmakers,
and Israeli officials were reported pressing lawmakers to oppose the deal.
[Of course, if U.S. officials try to influence Israeli politics,
American Jews get outraged.
In my opinion, the Jewish majority is totally hypocritical about this and so many other matters,
such as immigration ("Good for the U.S., bad for Israel.").]
“These allegations are total nonsense,” said a spokesman for the Embassy of Israel in Washington.
A U.S. intelligence official familiar with the intercepts said Israel’s pitch to undecided lawmakers often included such questions as: “How can we get your vote? What’s it going to take?”
NSA intelligence reports helped the White House figure out which Israeli government officials had leaked information from confidential U.S. briefings. When confronted by the U.S., Israel denied passing on the briefing materials.
The agency’s goal was “to give us an accurate illustrative picture of what [the Israelis] were doing,” a senior U.S. official said.
Just before Mr. Netanyahu’s address to Congress in March, the NSA swept up Israeli messages that raised alarms at the White House: Mr. Netanyahu’s office wanted details from Israeli intelligence officials about the latest U.S. positions in the Iran talks, U.S. officials said.
A day before the speech, Secretary of State John Kerry made an unusual disclosure. Speaking to reporters in Switzerland, Mr. Kerry said he was concerned Mr. Netanyahu would divulge “selective details of the ongoing negotiations.”
The State Department said Mr. Kerry was responding to Israeli media reports that Mr. Netanyahu wanted to use his speech to make sure U.S. lawmakers knew the terms of the Iran deal.
Intelligence officials said the media reports allowed the U.S. to put Mr. Netanyahu on notice without revealing they already knew his thinking. The prime minister mentioned no secrets during his speech to Congress.
In the final months of the campaign, NSA intercepts yielded few surprises. Officials said the information reaffirmed what they heard directly from lawmakers and Israeli officials opposed to Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign—that the prime minister was focused on building opposition among Democratic lawmakers.
The NSA intercepts, however, revealed one surprise.
Mr. Netanyahu and some of his allies voiced confidence they could win enough votes.
[End of article.]
by Patrick Buchanan
buchanan.org, 2017-05-22
Who is the real threat to the national security?
Is it President Trump who shared with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the intelligence that ISIS was developing laptop bombs to put aboard airliners?
Or is it The Washington Post that ferreted out and published this code-word intelligence, and splashed the details on its front page, alerting the world, and ISIS, to what we knew.
...
Those who leaked this to hurt Trump, and those who published this in the belief it would hurt Trump, sees themselves as the “Resistance” — like the French Resistance to Vichy in World War II.
,,,
The adversary press asserts in its actions a right to collude with and shelter disloyal and dishonorable officials who violate our laws by leaking secrets that they are sworn to protect.
Why do these officials become criminals, and why do the mainstream media protect them?
Because this seedy bargain is the best way to advance their common interests.
The media get the stolen goods to damage Trump. Anti-Trump officials get their egos massaged, their agendas advanced and their identities protected.
This is the corrupt bargain the Beltway press has on offer.
For the media, bringing down Trump is also good for business. TV ratings of anti-Trump media are soaring. The “failing New York Times” has seen a surge in circulation. The Pulitzers are beckoning.
And bringing down a president is exhilarating. As Ben Bradlee reportedly said during the Iran-Contra scandal that was wounding President Reagan, “We haven’t had this much fun since Watergate.”
...
When Trump gets home from his trip, he should direct Justice to establish an office inside the FBI to investigate all illegal leaks since his election and all security leaks that are de facto felonies, and name a special prosecutor to head up the investigation.
Then he should order that prosecutor to determine if any Trump associates, picked up by normal security surveillance, were unmasked, and had their names and conversations spread through the intel community, on the orders of Susan Rice and Barack Obama, to seed the bureaucracy to sabotage the Trump presidency before it began.
by Michael Gerson
Washington Post, 2017-05-23
...
How in God’s name did the reporter gain access to a discussion in the Oval Office? According to the article, the “memcon” — the memorandum of conversation — was “read to The New York Times by an American official.”
Let that sink in. This is a document of very limited distribution. According to sources I consulted, it typically would not have even been given to the director of the CIA. This was a leak of an extremely sensitive and highly classified document by a very senior person.
[Another possibility: Some low to mid level staff person performing administrative duties.]
2006-07-02:
Added 2006-06-23-NYT,
the NYT’s exposure of the Swift banking surveillance program,
and 2006-06-25-Keller, Bill Keller’s letter defending the exposure.
2006-06-20:
Added 2006-06-11-Kaiser,
a defense by the Washington Post’s Robert G. Kaiser
of the media's publication of classified information,
with extensive comments (by the author of this blog) on his arguments.
2006-05-31:
Added 1950-18USC-798
and two blog entries discussing its applicability,
2006-01-06-Johnson and 2006-01-06-Joyner.
2006-02-01:
Extensive comments have been added to the full-text articles
2005-12-22-Washington-Post and
2005-12-23-Washington-Post.]
This report has three parts.
- A case study:
A chronology of the leaks in 1998, 2005 and 2006
regarding attempts to gather intelligence on al Qaeda,
and the media’s reaction thereto. - A general analysis:
Michael Scheuer’s extended discussion,
extracted from his Imperial Hubris,
of the problems that leaking poses for the intelligence community. - Miscellaneous articles
Chronology of the 1998, 2005 and 2006 Leaks
This is a chronology of publicly available, unclassified, materialrelated to
- the 1998 leak of the fact that the United States was
intercepting and exploiting Osama bin Laden’s telecommunications, - the 2005 leak of the fact that President Bush ordered
NSA monitoring of certain al Qaeda-related domestic communications, and - the 2006 leak regarding
SWIFT monitoring of international banking transactions.
so much of what is being said
regarding the prevalence and criticality of leaks regarding national security,
especially by the evil Washington Post,
is flagrantly untrue.
(Are they stupid or just congenital liars?
They’re the ones who “cherrypicked”
so much of the prewar information environment—
for example, as pointed out here.)
Material that, on the face of it,
should be classified as SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information),
unless definitively proved otherwise,
is highlighted in red.
My comments, when within quoted text,
appear in this color.
Each item in the chronology begins with a header in this color.
The contents of the header is a tag that can be used to directly address that item,
e.g.,
the first item could be accessed by entering
#1998-08-07-AQ-bomb
as a URL,
either directly in a browser or embedded in an <a href="..."> HTML tag.
Entries in the chronology
1950
1950-18USC-7981998
1998-08-07-AQ-bomb1998-08-17-WP (SCI)
1998-08-20-US-bomb
1998-08-21-WT
1998-08-23-WT (SCI)
1998-08-24-WT (SCI)
1998–2004
2002-BS-AST2004-Sch-IH
2004-9-11-Comm
2005
2005-12-16-NYT2005-12-19-Bush-PC
2005-12-20-WP
2005-12-20-NYT
2005-12-20-Benj
2005-12-21-WT
2005-12-22-WP
2005-12-23-WP
2006
2006-01-06-Johnson2006-01-06-Joyner
2006-02-12-NYT
2006-06-11-Kaiser
2006-06-23-NYT
2006-06-25-Keller
1950-18USC-798
The law governing the disclosure of communication intelligence data isTitle 18, Section 798 of the United States Code.
1998-08-07-AQ-bomb
On 1998-08-07, al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa.1998-08-17-WP
On 1998-08-17, the Washington Post published“Suspect Links Embassy Blast To Saudi Exile”
by Pamela Constable and Kamran Kahn,
which contained:
Vincent Cannistraro,
former head of the CIA's counterintelligence unit,
said he is aware of
intercepted electronic communications among bin Laden associates
in the aftermath of the embassy bombings
in which
they take credit for the attacks and exchange warm congratulations.
He said investigators immediately considered bin Laden a suspect in the bombings and that subsequent intelligence information has only strengthened their suspicions.
"There is solid intelligence that overwhelmingly points to bin Laden,"
Cannistraro said.
"You have an intelligence investigation, and you have a criminal investigation, but in this case, the two sides seem to be coming together."
1998-08-20-US-bomb
On 1998-08-20, the U.S. launched cruise missile strikeson targets in Afghanistan and Sudan thought to be related to al Qaeda.
1998-08-21-WT
On 1998-08-21, the Washington Times published a profile of Osama bin Laden,Terrorist is driven by hatred for U.S., Israel,
including this statement (emphasis added):
He [Osama bin Laden] keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones ...This is the statement that was highlighted in the 9/11 Report
and which was (perhaps as a consequence) cited by the White House
to back up President Bush’s news conference statement,
and which the WP and many other media outlets
have taken great delight in pointing out
was not the product of a leak.
But just because that one statement wasn’t necessarily due to a leak
hardly means that leaks did not occur,
and did not destroy carefully constructed and nationally vital sources and methods.
Read on for examples.
1998-08-23-WT
On 1998-08-23, the Washington Times publishedBin Laden's several links to terrorist units known,
including these statements (emphasis added):
U.S. intelligence officials said
the CIA had received electronic intercepts linking bin Laden
to the Khobar bombing -
some of the same electronic evidence that linked his group
to the Africa bombings.
...
According to a [CIA Counterterrorism Center] report labeled "top secret" but obtained by The Washington Times,
bin Laden told several confederates that the Riyadh bombing was the first action, Dhahran was the second and that "more is coming."
Among those who called bin Laden to congratulate him for the Dhahran bombing were the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman Zawahiri, and a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad named Ashra Hadi.
Both are terrorist groups.
Bin Laden also was notified by telephone of the Nov. 13, 1995, bombing in Riyadh on the same day as the blast.
1998-08-24-WT
On 1998-08-24, the Washington Times publishedUNNAMED MISSION Last week's U.S. retaliatory strikes,
which included this paragraph (emphasis added):
In the two weeks following the Aug. 7 attacks
against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,
the United States reaped an intelligence bonanza
from intercepted terrorists' radio and telephone calls.
In part, that helped the United States quickly identify Osama bin Laden as the mastermind behind the two embassy bombings.
2002-BS-AST
In 2002, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon published The Age of Sacred Terror,which on page 261 contains (emphasis is added):
The Washington Times—It is interesting that the (18-page) index
the capital’s unabashed right-wing newspaper,
which consistently has
the best sources in the intelligence world and
the least compunction about leaking—
ran a story mentioning that bin Laden
“keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones.”
[An endnote referenced here contains:Martin Sieff, “Terrorist Is Driven by Hatred for U.S., Israel,”That is, this story.]
Washington Times, 21 Aug. 1998, A1.
Bin Laden stopped using the satellite phone instantly.
The al-Qaeda leader was not eager to court the fate of Djokar Dudayev,
the Chechen insurgent leader who was killed
by a Russian air defense suppression missile
that homed in on its target using his satellite phone signal.
When bin Laden stopped using the phone and let his aides do the calling,
the United States lost its best chance to find him.
to the first, hard-back, edition of The Age of Sacred Terror
contains 14 references to the Washington Post but,
despite the above,
none to the Washington Times, satellite phone, or even just phone.
Although much attention has been paid to that passage after it appeared,
it would appear that the authors
didn’t consider it that significant at the time of writing.
2004-Sch-IH
In mid-2004, Michael Scheuer publishedImperial Hubris:
Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror.
Its Chapter 6, Section 4, subtly titled “Leaks: Hubris or Treason?”,
was a seven-page fiery, impassioned critique
of the prevailing culture of leaking in Washington,
a culture abetted and condoned by the powerful,
politicians and media both.
Scheuer had the right, the background, and the knowledge
to make such a critique,
having spent 20-plus years working at the CIA,
three years of which (1996–1999) were spent heading
the CIA’s unit assigned and dedicated
to watching, tracking, and analyzing the activities of bin Laden and al Qaeda,
and having watched the best work of America’s intelligence community
being sabotaged (“undermined” is far too weak a word) by leakers.
Who in Washington has a better perch to speak of the damage that leaks can cause?
At any rate, IH Section 6.4 contains the following paragraph,
combining passion, wisdom, and love for America,
a paragraph which, of course,
has been ignored by the craven editors of the media
(emphasis and links have been added):
[6.4.3]
Leaks are a major factor
limiting the effectiveness of U.S. efforts to defeat Osama bin Laden, et al.
The first serious leak about al Qaeda was in the Washington Times
after the [1998-08-20] U.S. cruise missile attack
on al Qaeda camps near Khowst, Afghanistan.
The attack was in response to
the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania thirteen days earlier.
In the [1998-08-24] Times article,
“senior” U.S. Department of Defense officials revealed that
precise U.S. targeting of the camps was based on
electronically intercepting bin Laden’s conversations.
“In the two weeks following the Aug. 7 attacks
against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,”
Ernest Blazar wrote in his “Inside the Ring” column,
“the United States reaped an intelligence bonanza
from intercepted terrorists’ radio and telephone calls.”
The senior leaders told Blazar they had not leaked sooner because
“it was hoped that terrorists would again use their compromised networks to rally in the wake of the Tomahawk [cruise missile] attacks.
Said one U.S. official:
‘We want to see who is still using the same cell phone numbers.’ ”
Apparently these genius leakers
had decided it was time to make sure the terrorists
would not use the phone again.
Well, as night follows day,
the intelligence community lost this priceless advantage
when bin Laden and his men stopped using the phones.
- A direct trail leads
from- the leak that caused the loss of access to bin Laden’s planning conversations
- to
- the surprise attack on 2001-09-11.
This leak, moreover,
initiated a series of al Qaeda leaks that remains in full spate.
It is mind-boggling that the editors of the Washington Post
(not to mention those of the New York Times and Washington Times)
have systematically ignored the information in this paragraph
in their subsequent coverage of leaks, and
in their campaign to mock the Bush administration’s efforts
to fight the climate of leaking
which Scheuer has so wisely and passionately warned against.
One might ask why Scheuer’s warning
has been so systematically ignored by the elite media.
Any answer, by other than the editors of the elite media themselves,
is of course speculation.
Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that Scheuer has been subjected to
a campaign of vituperation and insult from certain quarters of America’s elite.
As examples, note
- the assault on Scheuer’s very intelligence noted here, and
- the remarks here, which
- put Scheuer in the company of
“Buchanan and other sniveling weasels of the far right,” - describe Scheuer’s writings as “pitiful stuff,”
- assert that
“if an idiot like Scheuer
[Scheuer holds two masters degrees and a doctorate,
all in history,
specializing in the diplomatic history of the British Empire]
could be entrusted with U.S. intelligence
then maybe the people running the CIA
weren’t as smart as we were led to believe.” - and assert that
“A close reading of Scheuer’s book and his public statements
makes it clear that
a complete housecleaning of this ‘rogue agency,’
as it has been termed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.),
isn’t merely appropriate, it is a national priority.”
from the opposite point of view, in Is the CIA the ZIA?.) - put Scheuer in the company of
2004-9-11-Comm
In 2004, the 9-11 commission published the 9-11 Commission Report, whose Section 4.4 contained the following (emphasis added):[The Afgani] tribals did seem to have success in reporting where Bin Ladin was.104 This information was more useful than it had been in the past; since the August missile strikes, Bin Ladin had taken to moving his sleeping place frequently and unpredictably and had added new bodyguards. Worst of all, al Qaeda's senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication almost immediately after a leak to the Washington Times.105 This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his conversations.The endnote, 105, contained the following (link added):
105. See Martin Sieff, "Terrorist Is Driven by Hatred for U.S., Israel," Washington Times, Aug. 21, 1998, p. 1. Regarding the leak, see Mary C. interview (Oct. 25, 2003); Richard Taylor interview (Dec. 10, 2003); Don Kerr interview (Sept. 9, 2003).
2005-12-16-NYT
On 2005-12-16 James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times reported:Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
2005-12-19-Bush-PC
On 2005-12-19 President Bush held a press conference, in the course of which he was asked “Are you going to order a leaks investigation into the disclosure of the NSA surveillance program?”, and responded (emphasis added):My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy. You've got to understand -- and I hope the American people understand -- there is still an enemy that would like to strike the United States of America, and they're very dangerous. And the discussion about how we try to find them will enable them to adjust. Now, I can understand you asking these questions and if I were you, I'd be asking me these questions, too. But it is a shameful act by somebody who has got secrets of the United States government and feels like they need to disclose them publicly. Let me give you an example about my concerns about letting the enemy know what may or may not be happening. In the late 1990s, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone. And then the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak. And guess what happened? Saddam -- Osama bin Laden changed his behavior. He began to change how he communicated.[For a previous, open-source, discussion of this, see, e.g., Scheuer-IH-6.4.3]
2005-12-20-WP
The next day, 2005-12-20, the Washington Post published “Osama Bin Laden and the Leak That Wasn't” by Glenn Kessler, which included (link added):[T]he reality is more complicated. The White House says the president was referring to a profile of the al Qaeda leader that appeared in the Washington Times on Aug. 21, 1998. In the 21st paragraph, the article stated: "He keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones and has given occasional interviews to international news organizations." The information in the article does not appear to be based on any government leak and made no reference to government surveillance of bin Laden's phone.
2005-12-20-NYT
Also the next day, 2005-12-20, the New York Times published “Bush Account of a Leak’s Impact Has Support” by David E. Rosenbaum, which included (links added):The president was apparently referring to an article in The Washington Times in August 1998. Toward the end of a profile of Mr. bin Laden on the day after American cruise missiles struck targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, that newspaper, without identifying a source, reported that "he keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones." The article drew little attention at the time in the United States. But last year, the Sept. 11 commission declared in its final report: "Al Qaeda's senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication almost immediately after a leak to The Washington Times. This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his conversations." There was a footnote to the newspaper article.
2005-12-20-Benj
On 2005-12-20 Slate published Bush's Bogus Analogy: In 1998, the Washington Times tipped off Osama. In 2005, the New York Times didn't. by Daniel Benjamin. This is mentioned for completeness only.2005-12-21-WT
The next day, 2005-12-21, the Washington Times corrected all parties, the 9/11 commission, the WP, the NYT, and one presumes, the White House (link added): Times faulted by 9/11 panel[T]he story in The Washington Times was not based on a leak, and it did not say the U.S. was monitoring the phone. Reports of bin Laden's using a satellite phone had been in the press for years. (emphasis added) In 1996, Time magazine, in a story on bin Laden in Afghanistan, wrote that he "uses satellite phones to contact fellow Islamic militants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa." The day before The Washington Times story appeared in 1998, CNN did a report on how bin Laden operates. The report quoted a bin Laden watcher as saying, "The guy has a fair amount of money. He communicates by satellite phone, even though Afghanistan in some levels is back in the Middle Ages and a country that barely functions. Bin Laden has been able to function fairly well there." CBS News reported that night that bin Laden had given an interview to the British Broadcasting Corp. in London, using a satellite phone from Afghanistan. The same day The Washington Times story appeared, USA Today ran a Page One story on bin Laden that said "a former U.S. official says that bin Laden had a fondness for his cell phone."
2005-12-22-WP
On 2005-12-22, the Washington Post published “File the Bin Laden Phone Leak Under ‘Urban Myths’ ” by their reporter (who normally has the State Department beat) Glenn Kessler. This article makes two central arguments: first, that the 1998-08-21-WT article did not represent a leak, because the information was already publicly available from sources which did not involve the intelligence community, and, second, that (emphasis added)It was not until Sept. 7, 1998 -- after bin Laden apparently stopped using his phone -- that a newspaper reported that the United States had intercepted his phone calls and obtained his voiceprint.and thus, the WP claims, the reporting of United States newspapers could not have led to the change in bin Laden’s behavior. Unfortunately, crucially, and inexplicably, considering that
- there has been no bigger story in the decade than 9/11;
- this is about a lost opportunity to have prevented that attack;
- the alleged lost opportunity involves newspaper reporting,
which is the Washington Post’s business, for Christ’s sake,
and further involves leaks from government officials,
which, as we all know, the Washington papers absolutely love and
depend on
2005-12-23-WP
On 2005-12-23, the Washington Post published “On Leaks, Relying on A Faulty Case Study Untrue Bin Laden Satellite Phone Story Still Has Currency With Media's Critics”, which continues the WP’s theme that because the 1998-08-21-WT story didn’t depend on a leak, therefore the “Bin Laden Satellite Phone Story” is “Untrue.”2006-01-06-Johnson
The Times and the law by Scott W. Johnson, Power Line Blog, 2006-01-06 [The applicability of 18 U.S.C. § 798 to the NYT’s disclosure of the NSA surveillance program.]2006-01-06-Joyner
Can NYT Be Prosecuted for Publishing Classified Info? By James Joyner Outside the Beltway, 2006-01-06 [Scott Johnson] and co-blogger John Hinderaker are almost certainly correct in guessing that the Administration would be exceedingly reluctant to bring charges against the most powerful newspaper in the land. [More on 18 U.S.C. § 798 and the NYT.]2006-02-12-NYT
Inquiry Into Wiretapping Article Widens By DAVID JOHNSTON New York Times, 2006-02-12 Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said no one at the paper had been contacted in connection with the investigation [into the circumstances surrounding a New York Times article published in December that disclosed the existence of a highly classified domestic eavesdropping program], and he defended the paper's reporting. "Before running the story we gave long and sober consideration to the administration's contention that disclosing the program would damage the country's counterterrorism efforts," Mr. Keller said. "We were not convinced then, and have not been convinced since, that our reporting compromised national security. "What our reporting has done is set off an intense national debate about the proper balance between security and liberty — a debate that many government officials of both parties, and in all three branches of government, seem to regard as in the national interest."2006-06-11-Kaiser
Public Secrets By Robert G. Kaiser Washington Post, 2006-06-11 [This article, published in the WP’s Sunday Outlook section, is a comprehensive attempt at defending the publication of classified information by the media in general and the Washington Post in particular. Below are some excerpts; emphasis and comments have been added.] Why does The Washington Post willingly publish "classified" information affecting national security? Should Post journalists and others who reveal the government's secrets be subject to criminal prosecution for doing so? These questions, raised with new urgency of late, deserve careful answers. ... Thanks to resourceful reporters, we have learned a great deal about the war that the administration apparently never intended to reveal: ... that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping without warrants on the phone calls of countless Americans, as well as keeping track of whom Americans called from home and work. You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged? [Yes, I would have preferred not to know about the NSA surveillance programs. I do not have a need to know, nor does anyone else without the appropriate clearance. With regard to the “war being waged in America’s name,” there are some aspects of how that war is being waged by America that must remain secret if they are to remain effective. In World War II, the Allies broke the cipher systems of both Germany and Japan. The fact that we had done so was perhaps the Allies’ most closely guarded secret. The reason was quite simple: If the Axis had known we could read their codes, they would have changed their cipher systems and we would have lost this precious insight into their plans. The situation today with regard to NSA and al Qaeda is precisely analogous. Whatever methods NSA and other agencies have to look into al Qaeda’s plans, if those methods are made public, as they were by the New York Times on 2005-12-16, then al Qaeda will inevitably and naturally change its communication strategies so as to avoid that particular observation method. And America will lose whatever ability it may possess to see into al Qaeda’s plans. (Don’t be fooled by the advice of various media “experts” that HUMINT is the answer, or an adequate substitute for SIGINT. HUMINT has many, many problems (most basically, perhaps, the inverse relation between ease of insertion (of an asset) and reliability (of that asset)), of which the scurrilous buffoons in the media are either unaware or unwilling to discuss openly. HUMINT should not be neglected, but it is not the panacea that some seem to suggest.) It’s that simple. The Post is, in my opinion, engaged in a despicable attempt to mislead its readers by not presenting these simple, well known, but vital and relevant facts in its article.]In 1986, William Casey, then the director of central intelligence, threatened The Post with legal action if we disclosed an intelligence-gathering operation code-named Ivy Bells. "There's no way you can run that story without endangering the national security," Casey ominously warned Ben Bradlee, The Post's executive editor at the time. But it turned out that when Casey issued this warning, the Soviet Union had already learned about Ivy Bells from its spy Ronald Pelton; because of Pelton, the Soviets had captured the hardware that had allowed the United States to listen to Soviet naval communications. So in reality we proposed to publish old news. But Casey had intimidated us; even after learning that the Soviets knew the secret, we equivocated for weeks. Finally, NBC News scooped us on our own story, then we published our version. As the editor supervising preparation of the story, I was humiliated; I also learned a good lesson. [This is disingenuous in the extreme. In the first place, even if we knew that the Soviet Union knew about our intelligence operation, it may be disadvantageous to let the Soviet Union know that we knew that they knew. In intelligence matters, invariably, the less said, the better, unless the intent is to deliberately disinform the enemy. In the second place, just because the Soviet Union knew that we had the capability implemented by Ivy Bells doesn’t mean that other nations knew. The capability might be useful against those other nations. Why broadcast to the whole world that we had that capability? It is unbelievable that the Post is unable to see that last point. Shame on them.]
Secrecy and security are not the same. On this point, Exhibit A for journalists here at The Post is the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. [There is an important point of logic that Kaiser glosses over. Just because secrecy and security are not always the same does not mean that they are never the same. No matter how many examples the media may trot out where material was overclassified, that does not mean that the media may or should function as a de facto declassification board, with each editor being free to declassify anything that comes into his ambit.]
I want to add, immodestly, that The Post's record on stories of this kind is good. I don't know of a single case when the paper had to retract or correct an important story containing classified information. Nor do I know of a case when we compromised a secret government program, or put someone's life in danger, or gave an enemy significant assistance. [In total contradiction, Michael Scheuer has said “Unavoidably, [the Post’s actions] will weaken America against al Qaeda and result in more dead Americans.” ]
Robert G. Kaiser is an associate editor of The Washington Post. He served as the paper's managing editor from 1991 to 1998.
2006-06-23-NYT
Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN New York Times, 2006-06-23 [Emphasis is added.] WASHINGTON, June 22 — Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.2006-06-25-Keller
Letter From Bill Keller on The Times’s Banking Records Report, by Bill Keller, New York Times, 2006-06-25 [Excerpts from Keller’s letter (emphasis is added):] [O]ur story about the government's surveillance of international banking records has generated some questions and concerns that I take very seriously. As the editor responsible for the difficult decision to publish that story, I'd like to offer a personal response. ... Who are the editors of The New York Times (or the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and other publications that also ran the banking story) to disregard the wishes of the President and his appointees? And yet the people who invented this country saw an aggressive, independent press as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy, and an essential ingredient for self-government. They rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish. ... Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress. Most Americans seem to support extraordinary measures in defense against this extraordinary threat, but some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight. We believe The Times and others in the press have served the public interest by accurately reporting on these programs so that the public can have an informed view of them. ... A secondary argument against publishing the banking story was that publication would lead terrorists to change tactics. But that argument was made in a half-hearted way. [This is a subjective opinion, that the Government has vehemently denied.] It has been widely reported — indeed, trumpeted by the Treasury Department — that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash. [This ignores fundamental laws of human nature, such as, “Out of sight, out of mind.” Given time, without being reminded of the vigor of America’s counter-terrorist effort, the terrorists would almost inevitably let down their guard. The constant front-page statements in America’s elite media about exactly how the U.S. is conducting its anti-terrorist intelligence efforts can only be the most effective possible method for more highly motivating the terrorists to avoid those efforts. Bill Keller, and his peers who have supported him in revealing to all exactly how America conducts counter-terrorism, can only earn our contempt for not realizing (or admitting) this fundamental truth.]Notes/References
[These are the complete texts of some of the newspaper articles cited above. In some cases, especially 2005-12-22-Washington-Post and 2005-12-23-Washington-Post, extensive comments have been added.]1998
1998-08-21-Washington-Times
1998-08-21 Washington Times Terrorist is driven by hatred for U.S., Israel by Martin Sieff Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire whose operations were the target of yesterday's U.S. air strikes, is a devout Muslim who for the last decade has dedicated himself to killing as many Americans and Israelis as he can. Mounting evidence that he was behind the attacks that killed 12 Americans and 245 others at two U.S. embassies this month is the latest sign of his hatred for the United States. The State Department describes him as "one of the most significant sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today." According to Pentagon and CIA intelligence reports, bin Laden through his Al-Qaida organization masterminds an octopus of terror activity in more than 50 countries. These include: * The Philippines, where he supports terrorist training camps in the southern island of Mindanao and has supported plots to assassinate President Clinton and the pope during visits to Manila. * The United States, where officials consider him an unindicted co-conspirator in the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing. * Somalia, where he supplied arms against the U.S. humanitarian intervention in 1993. * Yemen, where he has claimed responsibility for bomb attacks on U.S. servicemen there in 1992. He was also said to be behind an abortive plot to blow up 11 American airliners over Asia in 1994. The CIA reported in January that Egypt's Gamaat al Islamiya group, which slaughtered 58 tourists in Luxor last November, received funding from bin Laden. The group's operational leader, identified only as Hamza, resides with him in Afghanistan. The U.S. and Egyptian governments believe he funded a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in December 1995. Jordanian intelligence suspects him of funding Islamic extremists plotting to topple King Hussein of Jordan. Israeli intelligence has monitored his support of Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement that is fighting the Arab-Israeli peace process by killing Israeli civilians with suicide bombers. Bin Laden is also believed to have funded the training of fundamentalist warriors fighting Russia in Chechnya and Tajikistan and battling Serbian forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Bin Laden was born to a life of ease and luxury. But he gave it all up in his 20s to take a personal role organizing Afghan Muslim guerrillas against Soviet invaders in the 1980s. He used millions of dollars of his own money to bring bulldozers and other construction equipment from his family's construction business - one of the largest in the Middle East - to build roads, hospitals and underground shelters, arms caches and tunnels, for the mujahideen. He fought with exceptional bravery in battles against the Red Army at Jaji in 1986 and at Shaban in 1987. But after the Soviets were driven from Afghanistan, bin Laden turned his intense religious views against the United States. In 1988, he founded his Al-Qaida organization to topple all the pro- Western governments of the Muslim world and forcefully establish a new Caliphate, or united religious rule, for the entire Muslim world. Bin Laden is believed to have masterminded at least two major terror attacks: the November 1995 bombing of a Saudi National Guard base killing seven persons, including five Americans, and the June 1996 bombing at Khobar Towers in Dhahran province that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. Bin Laden became a folk hero to thousands of passionate young Muslims across the Middle East, frustrated by their failure to find work in depressed economies and by what they saw as the continued humiliation of the Arab world at the hands of the United States. But his new role infuriated the government of his homeland. He was forced into exile and lived from 1991 to 1996 on a farm in Sudan, where he helped organize at least three major training camps for anti-Western terrorists. Bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan in 1996 because of U.S. and Saudi pressure on the Khartoum government. He returned to Afghanistan, where he lives in a compound outside Jallalabad with his three wives, two sons and several daughters. He keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones and has given occasional interviews to international news organizations, including Time magazine and CNN News. A CIA report says he has held discussions with Iranian intelligence operatives that may have been about granting him political asylum in Iran. He met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Sudan two years ago. Many of Pakistan's top military and intelligence officers sympathize with his pan-Islamic puritanism including, according to a Time magazine report, a former chief of Pakistani military intelligence. Bin Laden is a son of Mohammed bin Laden, a construction billionaire whose family came from Aden in what is now southern Yemen. According to some accounts, he was the 17th of 52 children. His family is the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia after the Royal House of Saud and is worth $5 billion. He is believed to control a personal fortune of $250 million to $300 million. Tall and bearded, bin Laden, 45, lives in his compound in feudal splendor, like a villain in a James Bond movie. He is protected by several hundred - his supporters claim several thousand - followers who live off his largesse and share his dreams of waging jihad, or holy war, against the American people and other "infidels" or "crusaders." But he is also a canny power broker who cultivates careful relations with the Taleban fundamentalists who run Afghanistan, and who also works closely with Iran, Iraq and Sudan as occasion warrants. * Toni Marshall and Bill Gertz contributed to this report.1998-08-23-Washington-Times
1998-08-23 Washington Times Bin Laden's several links to terrorist units known by Bill Gertz The shadowy terrorist financier whose camps were the target of U.S. missile strikes has a long list of connections to many groups and a few state sponsors of terrorism, according to U.S. intelligence officials and documents. Osama bin Laden and his Islamic followers have left a trail of terrorist activities that stretches from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City to the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen, to the recent blasts at two American embassies in Africa. Still, the CIA only recently concluded bin Laden was behind many of the transnational (not backed by one nation alone) terror attacks. "He's an interesting character in the sense that he's a transnational actor in and of himself," said a senior U.S. intelligence official, noting the denaturalized Saudi's wealth at about $250 million. "This is not someone who needs a state sponsor. He doesn't need their help to launch his terrorist activities." Thomas Pickering, undersecretary of state for political affairs, said that until the embassy bombings in Africa, which killed more than 250 persons on Aug. 7, most of the targets of bin Laden's attacks have been Arabs and Muslims. The attacks have included the attempted assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, an attack on the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan and the November 1995 bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five Americans working for the Saudi Arabian national guard, Mr. Pickering said. Asked about bin Laden's role in the Khobar Towers bombing in Dharhan, the senior official said, "I don't have anything about Khobar." Yet U.S. intelligence officials said the CIA had received electronic intercepts linking bin Laden to the Khobar bombing - some of the same electronic evidence that linked his group to the Africa bombings. White House National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger also said evidence on the Khobar bombing "goes down more than one path." "We have a number of different theories and information that leads in a number of different directions," he said. Despite that comment, U.S. officials said bin Laden remains a key suspect among senior U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials for the deadly Khobar Towers attack, which remain unsolved because of the Saudi government's reluctance to share investigative leads. Other intelligence shows Iran's government played a role. Bin Laden has not surfaced publicly since the bombing raid Thursday, but through a spokesman he vowed to continue attacks on Americans. The CIA's Counterterrorism Center said it has uncovered very convincing evidence identifying bin Laden as a key figure in the June 26, 1996, bombing of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran and the Nov. 13, 1995, blast in Riyadh. According to a center report labeled "top secret" but obtained by The Washington Times, bin Laden told several confederates that the Riyadh bombing was the first action, Dhahran was the second and that "more is coming." Among those who called bin Laden to congratulate him for the Dhahran bombing were the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman Zawahiri, and a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad named Ashra Hadi. Both are terrorist groups. Bin Laden also was notified by telephone of the Nov. 13, 1995, bombing in Riyadh on the same day as the blast. The CIA knows bin Laden has close ties to Sudan's ruling National Islamic Front - he was greeted by a senior Sudanese government official upon his arrival in Khartoum three days after the Khobar bombing. Bin Laden owns a farm about 12 miles southeast of Khartoum, where he held several meetings in 1996 with an Iraqi intelligence official, Egyptian terrorists and a known Palestian explosives expert who specializes in car bombs. His private Gulfstream G-8 jet has been photographed by U.S. spy satellites at the Khartoum airport in Sudan. After the Saudi government requested his extradition to Saudi Arabia, he was forced to flee Sudan in 1996. He set up operations in Afghanistan, where his ties to the Taleban movement have been described by the CIA as cordial, but not close. Another CIA report shows that two years ago, bin Laden set up a meeting with Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security officials at his residence in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The meeting showed that the Iranians were considering a relationship with him that would be difficult because of bin Laden's Sunni Muslim orientation and Tehran's radical Shi'ism. Bin Laden also was traced by the CIA to a meeting with Zawahiri, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader also suspected in the Aug. 7 embassy blasts. Bin Laden agreed to provide Zawahairi with funds for terrorist operations during a 1996 meeting in Basel, Switzerland, according to the CIA report. In 1997, bin Laden's organization suffered a major setback when a senior aide was arrested in a country that officials did not identify. The aide was identified by the CIA as Sidi al-Madani al- Ghazi Mustafa al-Tayyib, the organization's financial adviser. Tayyib is believed to have provided valuable intelligence on the group. The CIA also has traced bin Laden to terrorists in Yemen and Qatar. He reportedly shipped 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosive from Poland to Qatar. He also has been connected to the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was carried out by Islamic terrorists, and to terrorist training in the Philippines. Also last year, the CIA uncovered evidence that bin Laden had agreed to a request by the Taleban government in Afghanistan to take over funding of an irrigation canal in Helmand province. The funding displaced a U.S. non-governmental organization program of crop substitution aimed at curbing illicit drug production. The money was viewed as bin Laden's attempt to buy insurance against U.S. efforts to have him expelled from Afghanistan, U.S. officials said. Bin Laden resides at a secret location in Jalalabad, a provincial capital in Afghanistan. Asked during a 1997 CNN interview what his plans were, bin Laden said, "You'll see them and hear them in the media, God willing." "We have focused our declaration of jihad on striking at the U.S. soldier in Arabia," he told the network. The senior U.S. intelligence official told reporters that "numerous sources" of intelligence had converged "uniformly and persuasively" to link bin Laden and his organization to the planning, financing and execution of the Aug. 7 bombings. However, the information was not made public, raising questions about the timing of the missile strikes and President Clinton's personal problems. "We have not ruled out, however, that others share responsibility," the senior official said. "We are looking into every possibility." Those possibilities range from Iranian government involvement to other amorphous Islamic terrorists from the Middle East and South Asia with only a loose affiliation with bin Laden. The bold strike on the Sudanese chemical factory was based on intelligence indicating that bin Laden was working with the Khartoum government to test poisonous gases and to finance the manufacture and use of deadly nerve agents, the senior official said. The senior official said that among the groups identified at the Afghan training camps targeted in the missile raid were members of Egypt's Gama'at al Islamyia, other Sunni terrorists of various nationalities and terrorists from Kashmir on the disputed India- Pakistan border. "This is the largest terrorist training facility in the world," he said. Gama'at carried out the bloody attack on tourists in Luxor, Egypt, last year and has received funding from bin Laden. The group's operational leader resides in Afghanistan with bin Laden. Transnational terrorists loyal to bin Laden have "no epicenter," the senior official said. The Afghan base was "a very visible epicenter because of the amount of training and activity that goes on here." But we're talking about an individual with cells and a world-wide network," he said. "There is no one epicenter. It's very hard work to track him and his operatives around the world." Mr. Berger said that pressure on the Sudanese government in 1996 led to bin Laden's ouster from the country, and that the recent visit to Afghanistan by U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson was part of an unsuccessful bid to have him expelled from there. "We have been concerned about the threat that Osama bin Laden and his network posed to U.S. interests for quite some time," Mr. Berger said. Last May, bin Laden's group issued an edict calling for a systematic campaign of terrorism against the United States, prompting increased U.S. attention to the group and its activities, Mr. Berger said. Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism operations official, said bin Laden and his terrorists represent "the privatization of international terrorism." "He represents a complete new phenomena in the world of terrorism: non-state-supported terrorism backed by a religiously motivated leader with an intense hatred of America, as well as Israel and the secular Arab world," Mr. Cannistraro said. The goal of bin Laden's activities is to oust U.S. military forces and all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia, he said. Mr. Cannistraro said the U.S. government was slow to recognize bin Laden's style of terrorism, and he noted that only yesterday did the administration place him and his associates on the Treasury Department's list of recognized international terrorists. The State Department, however, placed him on its terrorist group list last year. The timing of the missile attacks raises suspicions about the administration's motives, Mr. Cannistraro said. Usually, the administration is slow to take military action, trying first to use diplomatic and ecconomic steps and then moving to covert intelligence operations, before a military strike. "When bombing is the first thing out of the box, you have to be a little suspicious that this was related more to domestic political considerations," Mr. Cannistraro said. "This is just going to engender more violence against Americans, and this time it will be civilians who will be the target," he said.1998-08-24-Washington-Times
1998-08-24 Washington Times UNNAMED MISSION Last week's U.S. retaliatory strikes by Ernest Blazar (part of the WT's “Inside the Ring” column) UNNAMED MISSION Last week's U.S. retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan are not the first time the United States has attacked enemies with Tomahawk missiles. And it's far from the first U.S. retaliatory strike against terrorists. Why then did the Pentagon treat this attack so differently? Security surrounding the mission was unusually tight before and after the midday strikes Thursday. Many Pentagon officials who otherwise would have been involved in the planning stages of such an operation were brought into the know only after the Tomahawks struck their targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. "This one was different," confirmed a Pentagon official. He said that even some top aides to Defense Secretary William S. Cohen were kept in the dark. "We are a clam this week, it's great," said a military officer Friday, when the Pentagon declined to provide the details it usually does soon after such strikes. "This is odd," said another. Pentagon officials confirmed one key reason for the shift in Pentagon procedure. In the two weeks following the Aug. 7 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the United States reaped an intelligence bonanza from intercepted terrorists' radio and telephone calls. In part, that helped the United States quickly identify Osama bin Laden as the mastermind behind the two embassy bombings. By keeping details of the missile strike secret, it was hoped that terrorists would again use their compromised networks to rally in the wake of the Tomahawk raids. Said one U.S. official: "We want to see who is still using the same cell-phone numbers."2004
2004-9-11-Commission
The 9-11 Commission Report, Chapter Four, Section Four2004-12-21-Tobin
The blame game: Blaming Israel for America’s troubles never goes out of fashion. by Jonathan S. Tobin Jewsweek.com, 2004-12-21 [Emphasis is added.] Not long ago, I was talking about reporting news on Israel with a young journalist who works for a major metropolitan daily newspaper. When it was pointed out that the Jewish press had an obligation to fill the gap in unbiased information and perspective on the Middle East, this man piped up, saying that was all well and good, but were Jewish journalists telling the truth about Israel being the reason America was a terror target? When I responded that this was nonsense, he replied insouciantly that we all knew very well that American support of Israel lay behind the war on terror -- and that it was fruitless to deny it. Is this view typical of most or even many Americans? Probably not, thank heaven. For the most part, it has been limited to the anti-Zionist fever swamps of the left or right where the likes of far-right-wing pundit Pat Buchanan or left-wing propaganda film auteur Michael Moore live. [I beg to differ. Pat Buchanan is actually quite a moderate rightist. Being on the right is not at all about supporting Israel: Many on the left support Israel as much as the neocons do. What puts Buchanan in the moderate right are his views on social issues and his patriotism (for America, not Israel).] But it is gaining traction, and one of the sources for this new respect for a bogus theory was the favorable reaction from many in America's chattering classes for a book published earlier this year. Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror spent several weeks on The New York Times best-seller list during the recent [2004] presidential campaign, as it edged ahead of a spate of other books bashing the Bush administration. But what made Hubris different was its author, a guy publishers called “Anonymous,” [actually I believe that was a request from the CIA] but who was described as a “senior U.S. intelligence official.” The mystery about Anonymous’ real identity didn’t last long, and was soon traced back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. The author was revealed to be none other than one of the agency’s chief spooks, Michael Scheuer, who was formerly the head of the C.I.A.’s unit dedicated to tracking down none other than terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Predictably, Scheuer does not take responsibility for the failure of his unit’s main task. But he does have a lot to say about the faults of the Bush administration and, rather pointedly, the flaws in American foreign policy that have led us to war with fundamentalist Islam. The No. 1 answer on that impressive list of faults is American support for Israel. Writing as if he stole Buchanan’s playbook, Scheuer’s [section] head on this topic is called “The Burden of an Eternal Dependent.” [Excerpted here.] He blasts what he calls America’s “overwhelmingly one-way alliance with Israel,” [who can deny the truth of that description?] and, like Buchanan and other sniveling weasels of the far right, complains that any criticism of the alliance is branded anti-Semitic. [That this is so is well-known and well-documented, and, in fact, this very article illustrates the opprobrium that comes with such criticism.] He dismisses Israel as a “far-away theocracy in all but name,” disputes its rightful label as a democracy, and preposterously blames the Jews for keeping millions of Palestinian refugees in “eternal exile,” instead of rightly naming the Arab states that have incarcerated them in camps rather than resettle them, as Israel has done with equally numerous Jewish refugees from Arab countries and other parts of the world. According to Scheuer, friendship for Israel comes at too high a price for Americans. American friends of Israel, he says, have “succeeded in lacing tight the ropes binding the American Gulliver to the tiny Jewish state.” Scheuer also says that Al Qaeda statements about the U.S.-Israel alliance are accurate, and is not shy about bizarrely referring to his former quarry bin Laden as a “great” man. After reading this pitiful [!!] stuff, readers are forced to come to some conclusions that Scheuer probably didn’t intend: namely, that for all of the flaws in the Bush administration’s strategies and the usual screwups that occur in any war, maybe some of the problems America has encountered ought not to be blamed on the Jewish “neoconservatives,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld or even on the president himself. Maybe the problem was the CIA. Because if an idiot [This is the key point. Tobin is so delusional that he cannot believe that what Scheuer says is correct. God help America that people like Tobin have as much power as they do.] like Scheuer could be entrusted with U.S. intelligence, then maybe the people running the CIA weren’t as smart as we were led to believe. Maybe it’s the people who are always being anonymously quoted expressing their dismay about administration policy (usually in stories that start on the front page of The New York Times, quoting unnamed CIA officials and suspiciously leaked CIA documents) that we should be worrying about, not the “Jewish lobby” that Scheuer obsesses about.A national priority
A close reading of Scheuer’s book and his public statements makes it clear that a complete housecleaning of this “rogue agency,” as it has been termed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), isn’t merely appropriate, it is a national priority. Indeed, it is the motives of those who have criticized new CIA director Porter Goss’ wholesale ousting of top agency operatives -- the ones who gave Scheuer the okay to publish a partisan book in the middle of a presidential campaign -- that ought to be put in question, not his. Of course, the problem is that lies about Israel and the willingness to “blame the Jews” for the war on terror and, by extension, the Sept. 11 attacks, have a tendency to spread far beyond the limited number of readers of Scheuer’s book or even those who saw the author’s appearances on “Sixty Minutes” or “Meet the Press” during his proverbial 15 minutes of fame. When former CIA officials wind up on the same page as Michael Moore and Pat Buchanan, you know something was very wrong at Langley. It’s high time these fools were turned out on their ears.2005
2005-12-20-Washington-Post
WP: Osama Bin Laden and the Leak That Wasn't Tuesday, December 20, 2005; Page A08 In his news conference yesterday, President Bush twice pointed to the same example to express his concern about the danger of newspaper leaks -- Osama bin Laden's phone. "The fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak," the president said. "And guess what happened? Saddam -- Osama bin Laden changed his behavior. He began to change how he communicated." Later, the president repeated the example and decried what he called "revealing sources, methods and what we use the information for" as helping "the enemy" change its behavior. But the reality is more complicated. The White House says the president was referring to a profile of the al Qaeda leader that appeared in the Washington Times on Aug. 21, 1998. In the 21st paragraph, the article stated: "He keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones and has given occasional interviews to international news organizations." The information in the article does not appear to be based on any government leak and made no reference to government surveillance of bin Laden's phone. But the relatively minor bit of detail had a big impact on bin Laden. "He stopped using the satellite phone instantly," wrote Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in their book "The Age of Sacred Terror," and thus "the United States lost its best chance to find him." -- Glenn Kessler2005-12-20-New-York-Times
NYT: Bush Account of a Leak's Impact Has Support by David E. Rosenbaum WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 - As an example of the damage caused by unauthorized disclosures to reporters, President Bush said at his news conference on Monday that Osama bin Laden had been tipped by a leak that the United States was tracking his location through his telephone. After this information was published, Mr. Bush said, Mr. bin Laden stopped using the phone. The president was apparently referring to an article in The Washington Times in August 1998. Toward the end of a profile of Mr. bin Laden on the day after American cruise missiles struck targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, that newspaper, without identifying a source, reported that "he keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones." The article drew little attention at the time in the United States. But last year, the Sept. 11 commission declared in its final report: "Al Qaeda's senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication almost immediately after a leak to The Washington Times. This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his conversations." There was a footnote to the newspaper article. Lee H. Hamilton, the vice chairman of the commission, mentioned the consequences of the article in a speech last month. He said: "Leaks, for instance, can be terribly damaging. In the late 90's, it leaked out in The Washington Times that the U.S. was using Osama bin Laden's satellite phone to track his whereabouts. Bin Laden stopped using that phone; we lost his trail." In their 2002 book, "The Age of Sacred Terror" (Random House), Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, who worked at the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, also mentioned the incident. They wrote, "When bin Laden stopped using the phone and let his aides do the calling, the United States lost its best chance to find him." More details about the use of satellite phones by Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants were revealed by federal prosecutors in the 2001 trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan of four men charged with conspiring to bomb two American embassies in East Africa in 1998. Asked at the outset of his news conference about unauthorized disclosures like the one last week that the National Security Agency had conducted surveillance of American citizens, Mr. Bush declared: "Let me give you an example about my concerns about letting the enemy know what may or may not be happening. In the late 1990's, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone. And the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak. And guess what happened? Osama bin Laden changed his behavior. He began to change how he communicated." Toward the end of the news conference, Mr. Bush referred again to this incident to illustrate the damage caused by leaks.2005-12-22-Washington-Post
File the Bin Laden Phone Leak Under ‘Urban Myths’ By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, December 22, 2005; A02 [Comments and links have been added and some minor (in my opinion) reformatting has been done. Further comments on this article appear in the summary above.] President Bush asserted this week that- the news media published a U.S. government leak in 1998
about Osama bin Laden's use of a satellite phone, - alerting the al Qaeda leader to government monitoring and
- prompting him to abandon the device.
- a 1996 news article, based on open sources,
which says
“bin Laden uses a satellite phone” and - the 1998 articles, which could only be based on classified information,
which say
“the U.S. is intercepting bin Laden’s phone traffic
and is processing and exploiting that traffic.”
Bush made his assertion at a news conference Monday, in which he defended his authorization of warrantless monitoring of communications between some U.S. citizens and suspected terrorists overseas. He fumed that "the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak." He berated the media for "revealing sources, methods and what we use the information for" and thus helping "the enemy" change its operations. [Again, Bush was right on.] White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Monday that the president was referring to an article that appeared in the Washington Times on Aug. 21, 1998, the day after the cruise missile attack, which was launched in retaliation for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa two weeks earlier. The Sept. 11 commission also cited the article as "a leak" that prompted bin Laden to stop using his satellite phone, though it noted that he had added more bodyguards and began moving his sleeping place "frequently and unpredictably" after the missile attack. Two former Clinton administration officials first fingered the Times article in a 2002 book, "The Age of Sacred Terror." Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote that after the "unabashed right-wing newspaper" published the story, bin Laden "stopped using the satellite phone instantly" and "the United States lost its best chance to find him." The article, a profile of bin Laden, buried the information about his satellite phone in the 21st paragraph. It never said that the United States was listening in on bin Laden, as the president alleged. The writer, Martin Sieff, said yesterday that the information about the phone was "already in the public domain" when he wrote the story.
A search of media databases shows that [1] Time magazine had first reported on Dec. 16, 1996, that bin Laden "uses satellite phones to contact fellow Islamic militants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa." Taliban officials provided the information, with one official -- security chief Mulla Abdul Mannan Niazi -- telling Time, "He's in high spirits." The day before the Washington Times article was published -- and the day of the attacks [1998-08-20] -- [2] CNN producer Peter Bergen appeared on the network to talk about an interview he had with bin Laden in 1997. "He communicates by satellite phone, even though Afghanistan in some levels is back in the Middle Ages and a country that barely functions," Bergen said. Bergen noted that as early as 1997, bin Laden's men were very concerned about electronic surveillance. "They scanned us electronically," he said, because they were worried that anyone meeting with bin Laden "might have some tracking device from some intelligence agency." In 1996, the Chechen insurgent leader Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed by a Russian missile that locked in to his satellite phone signal. [If this is what tipped al Qaeda off, why did they not stop using that phone in 1996, rather than continue using it until 1998 when the articles specifying U.S. intelligence methods appeared?] That same day, [3] CBS reported that bin Laden used a satellite phone to give a television interview. [4] USA Today ran a profile of bin Laden on the same day as the Washington Times's article, quoting a former U.S. official about his "fondness for his cell phone." It was not until Sept. 7, 1998 -- after bin Laden apparently stopped using his phone -- that a newspaper reported that the United States had intercepted his phone calls and obtained his voiceprint. U.S. authorities "used their communications intercept capacity to pick up calls placed by bin Laden on his Inmarsat satellite phone, despite his apparent use of electronic 'scramblers,' " the [5] Los Angeles Times reported. [See my remarks above for a discussion of this paragraph. More generally, it seems remarkable that the WP ’s search of media databases turned up four references to the use of the satellite phone that weren’t leaks, one reference that clearly was based on a leak but which appeared after bin Laden ceased use of the satellite phone, but not the three references to communications intercepts that clearly were leaks and appeared before, or contemporaneous with, his behavior change. Perhaps the WP ’s editors were hung up on the term “satellite phone.” But the substance of Bush’s complaint was about the leaking of our ability to intercept bin Laden’s communications, and the fact (as I have noted repeatedly) that such leaking had been done should surely have been well-known to the WP ’s editors and reporters dealing with national security.]
Officials could not explain yesterday why they focused on the Washington Times story when other news organizations at the same time reported on the satellite phone -- and that the information was not particularly newsworthy. "You got me," said Benjamin, who was director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff at the time. "That was the understanding in the White House and the intelligence community. The story ran and the lights went out." [My guess, and it is only a guess, is that here is where things went wrong. Benjamin somehow misunderstood what the IC was telling him (surely the IC was aware of and concerned about the other leaks), and so only reported the one non-leak in his book. That version then passed into Washington’s consciousness. But what is still puzzling is why the IC couldn’t lay the real problems on the table to the 9-11 commission (see next paragraph). This cries out for investigation and disclosure.] Lee H. Hamilton, vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, gave a speech in October in which he said the leak "was terribly damaging." Yesterday, he said the commission relied on the testimony of three "very responsible, very senior intelligence officers," [see the endnote to the 9-11 commission report] who he said "linked the Times story to the cessation of the use of the phone." He said they described it as a very serious leak. But Hamilton said he did not recall any discussion about other news outlets' reports. "I cannot conceive we would have singled out the Washington Times if we knew about all of the reporting," he said. [Again, this breakdown in communication between the IC and the 9-11 commission cries out for investigation and explanation. It is remarkable that the media can place so much faith in the results of the 9-11 commission when they want to, when in cases such as this, as well as the Able Danger situation, the 9-11 commission missed so much. Note also Scheuer’s condemnation of the work of the three committees.]
[Now for the key fact regarding the significance of the leaks:] A White House official said last night the administration was confident that press reports changed bin Laden's behavior. CIA spokesman Tom Crispell declined to comment, saying the question involves intelligence sources and methods.
2005-12-23-Washington-Post
On Leaks, Relying on A Faulty Case Study Untrue Bin Laden Satellite Phone Story Still Has Currency With Media's Critics By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, December 23, 2005; A03 [Comments and links have been added and some minor (in my opinion) reformatting has been done.] The allegation that news organizations leaked information about Osama bin Laden's satellite phone, thus shutting down a valuable source of intelligence that might have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has long been a prime case study cited by government officials seeking to impose greater restrictions on the news media. President Bush drew attention to the case Monday when he twice cited it as a dangerous example of the news media "revealing sources, methods and what we use the information for." Bush was basing his remarks on a conclusion by the Sept. 11 commission, which had labeled it a "leak" that prompted the al Qaeda leader to turn off his phone. Upon closer examination, the story turned out to be wrong. Bin Laden's use of a satellite phone had already been widely reported by August 1998, and he stopped using it within days of a cruise missile attack on his training camps in Afghanistan. Yet in recent years, advocates of new laws that would restrict the ability of the news media to report on intelligence matters have repeatedly cited the case of bin Laden's satellite phone as an especially dangerous example of media malfeasance. In July, Rep, Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, gave a speech titled "Secrets and Leaks: the Costs and Consequences for National Security," in which he highlighted the bin Laden case. "Were it not for a leak, there is a chance we could have brought Osama bin Laden to justice by now and have a better understanding of the al Qaeda operation," said Hoekstra, who is considering legislation to make it easier to prosecute leakers. A spokesman for Hoekstra did not return a call seeking comment. Hoekstra has distributed to lawmakers a classified report on leaks compiled by James B. Bruce, vice chairman of the CIA's Foreign Denial and Deception Committee, and a leading advocate of enacting very tough laws on leaks. In 2002, Bruce was quoted as saying that "we've got to do whatever it takes -- if it takes sending SWAT teams into journalists' homes -- to stop these leaks." Bruce has also repeatedly cited the bin Laden example as he made the case for new laws to stem leaks, such as making journalists and news organizations liable for prosecution if they report classified information or obtain classified documents. "Important intelligence collection capabilities against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were lost in the several year period leading to 9/11," Bruce told the American Bar Association on Nov. 22, 2002, saying the bin Laden case was "just the tip of the iceberg" of how disclosures hurt the campaign against terrorism. He did not cite other examples. Former deputy defense secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz mentioned bin Laden's phone in September 2002, saying it was an example of how "our intelligence sources and methods have also been devaluated by a pattern of leaks from the executive and legislative branches of government and through a number of well-known espionage cases." Bruce, who did not respond to an e-mail requesting comment, was a staff member of the 2005 Robb-Silberman Commission on Intelligence Capabilities, which included a classified annex that detailed leaks "that have collectively cost the American people millions of dollars." [“... millions ...” Ha! Try billions. And 9-11 itself.] A source said one of those cases is that of bin Laden's phone. Several commissioners declined to comment, except to say there were several incidents that showed significant damage to U.S. intelligence. Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, said the bin Laden case shows that the news media may play less of a role in intelligence failures than is often assumed. "Cruise missiles concentrate the mind a lot more than news clips do," he said. "It is the underlying reality, not the leaks, that does most of the damage." [See Scheuer-IH-6.4.3 for an informed alternative view. As to Blanton’s final assertion, consider the real reality: What the incoming cruise missiles tell al Qaeda is that they have been targeted. It would be a safe assumption, due to the timing, that they were being blamed for the East Africa embassy bombings. But there would be no reason, without the leaks, to connect this to the satellite phone. Their physical location was well-known from many sources, ranging from on-the-ground observation by hostile Afghan tribesmen to satellite photography. If al Qaeda suspected that their operational planning was being compromised, there could be many ways that that had happened, ranging from an agent within the al Qaeda inner circle to careless talk by their men to a bug within their encampment. There would be no reason for al Qaeda to instantly conclude “Aha! It must be the satellite phone.” That Blanton would suggest that “cruise-missile-strike implies satellite-phone compromise” (for that is the “intelligence failure” under discussion) is incredibly stupid, stupidity only matched by Kessler’s repeating such dross as if it were worth something. The even more shocking thing is that Washingtonians let the WP get away with such shabby nonsense.]2006
2006-02-12-New-York-Times
Inquiry Into Wiretapping Article Widens By DAVID JOHNSTON New York Times, 2006-02-12 [Emphasis is added.] WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 — Federal agents have interviewed officials at several of the country's law enforcement and national security agencies in a rapidly expanding criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding a New York Times article published in December that disclosed the existence of a highly classified domestic eavesdropping program, according to government officials. The investigation, which appears to cover the case from 2004, when the newspaper began reporting the story, is being closely coordinated with criminal prosecutors at the Justice Department, the officials said. People who have been interviewed and others in the government who have been briefed on the interviews said the investigation seemed to lay the groundwork for a grand jury inquiry that could lead to criminal charges. The inquiry is progressing as a debate about the eavesdropping rages in Congress and elsewhere. President Bush has condemned the leak as a "shameful act." Others, like Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A. director, have expressed the hope that reporters will be summoned before a grand jury and asked to reveal the identities of those who provided them classified information. Mr. Goss, speaking at a Senate intelligence committee hearing on Feb. 2, said: "It is my aim and it is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present being asked to reveal who is leaking this information. I believe the safety of this nation and the people of this country deserve nothing less." The case is viewed as potentially far reaching because it places on a collision course constitutional principles that each side regards as paramount. For the government, the investigation represents an effort to punish those responsible for a serious security breach and enforce legal sanctions against leaks of classified information at a time of heightened terrorist threats. For news organizations, the inquiry threatens the confidentiality of sources and the ability to report on controversial national security issues free of government interference. Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said no one at the paper had been contacted in connection with the investigation, and he defended the paper's reporting. "Before running the story we gave long and sober consideration to the administration's contention that disclosing the program would damage the country's counterterrorism efforts," Mr. Keller said. "We were not convinced then, and have not been convinced since, that our reporting compromised national security. "What our reporting has done is set off an intense national debate about the proper balance between security and liberty — a debate that many government officials of both parties, and in all three branches of government, seem to regard as in the national interest." Civil liberties groups and Democratic lawmakers as well as some Republicans have called for an inquiry into the eavesdropping program as an improper and possibly illegal intrusion on the privacy rights of innocent Americans. These critics have noted that the program appears to have circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court approval for eavesdropping on American citizens. Former Vice President Al Gore has called for a special prosecutor to investigate the government's use of the program, and at least one Democrat, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, has said the eavesdropping effort may amount to an impeachable offense. At the same time, conservatives have attacked the disclosure of classified information as an illegal act, demanding a vigorous investigative effort to find and prosecute whoever disclosed classified information. An upcoming article in Commentary magazine suggests that the newspaper may be prosecuted for violations of the Espionage Act and says, "What The New York Times has done is nothing less than to compromise the centerpiece of our defensive efforts in the war on terrorism." The Justice Department took the unusual step of announcing the opening of the investigation on Dec. 30, and since then, government officials said, investigators and prosecutors have worked quickly to assemble an investigative team and obtain a preliminary grasp of whether the leaking of the information violated the law. Among the statutes being reviewed by the investigators are espionage laws that prohibit the disclosure, dissemination or publication of national security information. A Federal Bureau of Investigation team under the direction of the bureau's counterintelligence division at agency headquarters has questioned employees at the F.B.I., the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the officials said. Prosecutors have also taken steps to activate a grand jury. The interviews have focused initially on identifying government officials who have had contact with Times reporters, particularly those in the newspaper's Washington bureau. The interviews appeared to be initially intended to determine who in the government spoke with Times reporters about intelligence and counterterrorism matters. In addition, investigators are trying to determine who in the government was authorized to know about the eavesdropping program. Several officials described the investigation as aggressive and fast-moving. The officials who described the interviews did so on condition of anonymity, citing the confidentiality of an ongoing criminal inquiry. The administration's chief legal defender of the program is Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who is also the senior official responsible for the leak investigation. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Feb. 6, Mr. Gonzales said: "I'm not going to get into specific laws that are being looked at. But, obviously, our prosecutors are going to look to see all the laws that have been violated. And if the evidence is there, they're going to prosecute those violations." Mr. Bush and other senior officials have said that the electronic surveillance operation was authorized by what they call the president's wartime powers and a Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda passed in the days after the September 2001 terror attacks. The government's increasing unwillingness to honor confidentiality pledges between journalists and their sources in national security cases has been evident in another case, involving the disclosure in 2003 of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson. The special counsel in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, demanded that several journalists disclose their conversations with their sources. Judith Miller, at the time a reporter for The Times, went to jail for 85 days before agreeing to comply with a subpoena to testify about her conversations with I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby has been indicted on charges of making false statements and obstruction of justice and has pleaded not guilty. "An outgrowth of the Fitzgerald investigation is that the gloves are off in leak cases," said George J. Terwilliger III, former deputy attorney general in the administration of the first President Bush. "New rules apply." How aggressively prosecutors pursue the new case involving the N.S.A. may depend on their assessment of the damage caused by the disclosure, Mr. Terwilliger said. "If the program is as sensitive and critical as it has been described, and leaking its existence could put the lives of innocent American people in jeopardy," he said, "that surely would have an effect on the exercise of prosecutorial discretion." Recently, federal authorities have used espionage statutes to move beyond prosecutions of government officials who disclose classified information to indict private citizens who receive it. In the case of a former Pentagon analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, who pleaded guilty to disclosing defense secrets, federal authorities have charged Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, formerly representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group. The two men have been indicted on charges of turning over information obtained from Mr. Franklin to a foreign government, which has been identified as Israel, and to journalists. At Mr. Franklin's sentencing hearing in Alexandria, Va., Judge T. S. Ellis III of Federal District Court said he believed that private citizens and government employees must obey laws against illegally disseminating classified information. "Persons who have unauthorized possession, who come into unauthorized possession of classified information, must abide by the law," Judge Ellis said. "That applies to academics, lawyers, journalists, professors, whatever." Some media lawyers believe that The Times has powerful legal arguments in defense of its reporting and in protecting its sources. Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., who has represented publications like The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, said: "There is a very strong argument that a federal common-law reporters' privilege exists and that privilege would protect confidential sources in this case. There is an extremely strong public interest in this information, and the public has the right to understand this controversial and possibly unconstitutional public policy."2006-06-25-Bill-Keller
Letter From Bill Keller on The Times's Banking Records Report by Bill Keller, New York Times, 2006-06-25 The following is a letter Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, has sent to readers who have written to him about The Times's publication of information about the government's examination of international banking records: I don't always have time to answer my mail as fully as etiquette demands, but our story about the government's surveillance of international banking records has generated some questions and concerns that I take very seriously. As the editor responsible for the difficult decision to publish that story, I'd like to offer a personal response. Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government's anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that's the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.) Some comes from readers who have considered the story in question and wonder whether publishing such material is wise. And some comes from readers who are grateful for the information and think it is valuable to have a public debate about the lengths to which our government has gone in combatting the threat of terror. It's an unusual and powerful thing, this freedom that our founders gave to the press. Who are the editors of The New York Times (or the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and other publications that also ran the banking story) to disregard the wishes of the President and his appointees? And yet the people who invented this country saw an aggressive, independent press as a protective measure against the abuse of power in a democracy, and an essential ingredient for self-government. They rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish. The power that has been given us is not something to be taken lightly. The responsibility of it weighs most heavily on us when an issue involves national security, and especially national security in times of war. I've only participated in a few such cases, but they are among the most agonizing decisions I've faced as an editor. The press and the government generally start out from opposite corners in such cases. The government would like us to publish only the official line, and some of our elected leaders tend to view anything else as harmful to the national interest. For example, some members of the Administration have argued over the past three years that when our reporters describe sectarian violence and insurgency in Iraq, we risk demoralizing the nation and giving comfort to the enemy. Editors start from the premise that citizens can be entrusted with unpleasant and complicated news, and that the more they know the better they will be able to make their views known to their elected officials. Our default position — our job — is to publish information if we are convinced it is fair and accurate, and our biggest failures have generally been when we failed to dig deep enough or to report fully enough. After The Times played down its advance knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy reportedly said he wished we had published what we knew and perhaps prevented a fiasco. Some of the reporting in The Times and elsewhere prior to the war in Iraq was criticized for not being skeptical enough of the Administration's claims about the Iraqi threat. The question we start with as journalists is not "why publish?" but "why would we withhold information of significance?" We have sometimes done so, holding stories or editing out details that could serve those hostile to the U.S. But we need a compelling reason to do so. Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff — but it's the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost in the heat of strong disagreements. Since September 11, 2001, our government has launched broad and secret anti-terror monitoring programs without seeking authorizing legislation and without fully briefing the Congress. Most Americans seem to support extraordinary measures in defense against this extraordinary threat, but some officials who have been involved in these programs have spoken to the Times about their discomfort over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight. We believe The Times and others in the press have served the public interest by accurately reporting on these programs so that the public can have an informed view of them. Our decision to publish the story of the Administration's penetration of the international banking system followed weeks of discussion between Administration officials and The Times, not only the reporters who wrote the story but senior editors, including me. We listened patiently and attentively. We discussed the matter extensively within the paper. We spoke to others — national security experts not serving in the Administration — for their counsel. It's worth mentioning that the reporters and editors responsible for this story live in two places — New York and the Washington area — that are tragically established targets for terrorist violence. The question of preventing terror is not abstract to us. The Administration case for holding the story had two parts, roughly speaking: first that the program is good — that it is legal, that there are safeguards against abuse of privacy, and that it has been valuable in deterring and prosecuting terrorists. And, second, that exposing this program would put its usefulness at risk. It's not our job to pass judgment on whether this program is legal or effective, but the story cites strong arguments from proponents that this is the case. While some experts familiar with the program have doubts about its legality, which has never been tested in the courts, and while some bank officials worry that a temporary program has taken on an air of permanence, we cited considerable evidence that the program helps catch and prosecute financers of terror, and we have not identified any serious abuses of privacy so far. A reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it. That said, we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don't know about it. We weighed most heavily the Administration's concern that describing this program would endanger it. The central argument we heard from officials at senior levels was that international bankers would stop cooperating, would resist, if this program saw the light of day. We don't know what the banking consortium will do, but we found this argument puzzling. First, the bankers provide this information under the authority of a subpoena, which imposes a legal obligation. Second, if, as the Administration says, the program is legal, highly effective, and well protected against invasion of privacy, the bankers should have little trouble defending it. The Bush Administration and America itself may be unpopular in Europe these days, but policing the byways of international terror seems to have pretty strong support everywhere. And while it is too early to tell, the initial signs are that our article is not generating a banker backlash against the program. By the way, we heard similar arguments against publishing last year's reporting on the NSA eavesdropping program. We were told then that our article would mean the death of that program. We were told that telecommunications companies would — if the public knew what they were doing — withdraw their cooperation. To the best of my knowledge, that has not happened. While our coverage has led to much public debate and new congressional oversight, to the best of our knowledge the eavesdropping program continues to operate much as it did before. Members of Congress have proposed to amend the law to put the eavesdropping program on a firm legal footing. And the man who presided over it and defended it was handily confirmed for promotion as the head of the CIA. A secondary argument against publishing the banking story was that publication would lead terrorists to change tactics. But that argument was made in a half-hearted way. It has been widely reported — indeed, trumpeted by the Treasury Department — that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash. I can appreciate that other conscientious people could have gone through the process I've outlined above and come to a different conclusion. But nobody should think that we made this decision casually, with any animus toward the current Administration, or without fully weighing the issues. Thanks for writing. Regards, Bill Keller2006-07-01-Dean-Baquet-Bill-Keller
When Do We Publish a Secret? By DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive editor, The New York Times New York Times, 2006-07-01 SINCE Sept. 11, 2001, newspaper editors have faced excruciating choices in covering the government's efforts to protect the country from terrorist agents. Each of us has, on a number of occasions, withheld information because we were convinced that publishing it could put lives at risk. On other occasions, each of us has decided to publish classified information over strong objections from our government. Last week our newspapers disclosed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international banking transactions. We did so after appeals from senior administration officials to hold the story. Our reports — like earlier press disclosures of secret measures to combat terrorism — revived an emotional national debate, featuring angry calls of "treason" and proposals that journalists be jailed along with much genuine concern and confusion about the role of the press in times like these. We are rivals. Our newspapers compete on a hundred fronts every day. We apply the principles of journalism individually as editors of independent newspapers. We agree, however, on some basics about the immense responsibility the press has been given by the inventors of the country. Make no mistake, journalists have a large and personal stake in the country's security. We live and work in cities that have been tragically marked as terrorist targets. Reporters and photographers from both our papers braved the collapsing towers to convey the horror to the world. We have correspondents today alongside troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others risk their lives in a quest to understand the terrorist threat; Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal was murdered on such a mission. We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism. But the virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings. It is also aimed at our values, at our freedoms and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror. Thirty-five years ago yesterday, in the Supreme Court ruling that stopped the government from suppressing the secret Vietnam War history called the Pentagon Papers, Justice Hugo Black wrote: "The government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people." As that sliver of judicial history reminds us, the conflict between the government's passion for secrecy and the press's drive to reveal is not of recent origin. This did not begin with the Bush administration, although the polarization of the electorate and the daunting challenge of terrorism have made the tension between press and government as clamorous as at any time since Justice Black wrote. Our job, especially in times like these, is to bring our readers information that will enable them to judge how well their elected leaders are fighting on their behalf, and at what price. In recent years our papers have brought you a great deal of information the White House never intended for you to know — classified secrets about the questionable intelligence that led the country to war in Iraq, about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the transfer of suspects to countries that are not squeamish about using torture, about eavesdropping without warrants. As Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of The Washington Post, asked recently in the pages of that newspaper: "You may have been shocked by these revelations, or not at all disturbed by them, but would you have preferred not to know them at all? If a war is being waged in America's name, shouldn't Americans understand how it is being waged?" Government officials, understandably, want it both ways. They want us to protect their secrets, and they want us to trumpet their successes. A few days ago, Treasury Secretary John Snow said he was scandalized by our decision to report on the bank-monitoring program. But in September 2003 the same Secretary Snow invited a group of reporters from our papers, The Wall Street Journal and others to travel with him and his aides on a military aircraft for a six-day tour to show off the department's efforts to track terrorist financing. The secretary's team discussed many sensitive details of their monitoring efforts, hoping they would appear in print and demonstrate the administration's relentlessness against the terrorist threat. How do we, as editors, reconcile the obligation to inform with the instinct to protect? Sometimes the judgments are easy. Our reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, take great care not to divulge operational intelligence in their news reports, knowing that in this wired age it could be seen and used by insurgents. Often the judgments are painfully hard. In those cases, we cool our competitive jets and begin an intensive deliberative process. The process begins with reporting. Sensitive stories do not fall into our hands. They may begin with a tip from a source who has a grievance or a guilty conscience, but those tips are just the beginning of long, painstaking work. Reporters operate without security clearances, without subpoena powers, without spy technology. They work, rather, with sources who may be scared, who may know only part of the story, who may have their own agendas that need to be discovered and taken into account. We double-check and triple-check. We seek out sources with different points of view. We challenge our sources when contradictory information emerges. Then we listen. No article on a classified program gets published until the responsible officials have been given a fair opportunity to comment. And if they want to argue that publication represents a danger to national security, we put things on hold and give them a respectful hearing. Often, we agree to participate in off-the-record conversations with officials, so they can make their case without fear of spilling more secrets onto our front pages. Finally, we weigh the merits of publishing against the risks of publishing. There is no magic formula, no neat metric for either the public's interest or the dangers of publishing sensitive information. We make our best judgment. When we come down in favor of publishing, of course, everyone hears about it. Few people are aware when we decide to hold an article. But each of us, in the past few years, has had the experience of withholding or delaying articles when the administration convinced us that the risk of publication outweighed the benefits. Probably the most discussed instance was The New York Times's decision to hold its article on telephone eavesdropping for more than a year, until editors felt that further reporting had whittled away the administration's case for secrecy. But there are other examples. The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism initiatives that are still in operation. In April, The Los Angeles Times withheld information about American espionage and surveillance activities in Afghanistan discovered on computer drives purchased by reporters in an Afghan bazaar. It is not always a matter of publishing an article or killing it. Sometimes we deal with the security concerns by editing out gratuitous detail that lends little to public understanding but might be useful to the targets of surveillance. The Washington Post, at the administration's request, agreed not to name the specific countries that had secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons, deeming that information not essential for American readers. The New York Times, in its article on National Security Agency eavesdropping, left out some technical details. Even the banking articles, which the president and vice president have condemned, did not dwell on the operational or technical aspects of the program, but on its sweep, the questions about its legal basis and the issues of oversight. We understand that honorable people may disagree with any of these choices — to publish or not to publish. But making those decisions is the responsibility that falls to editors, a corollary to the great gift of our independence. It is not a responsibility we take lightly. And it is not one we can surrender to the government. — DEAN BAQUET, editor, The Los Angeles Times, and BILL KELLER, executive editor, The New York Times2007
2007-07-29-NYT
Mining of Data Prompted Fight Over U.S. Spying By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID JOHNSTON New York Times, 2007-07-29 [An excerpt; emphasis is added.] WASHINGTON, July 28 — A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program. It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues. The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation. The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the N.S.A. program. Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program “confirmed” by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining. If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales’ defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct. But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who have been briefed on the program, called the testimony deceptive.2007-08-07-Scarborough
Bush makes it easier to tracking terror e-mails by Rowan Scarborough The (DC) Examiner, 2007-08-07 [An excerpt:] The intelligence officer told of cases in Iraq in which terrorists suspected of links to hostage-takers were located on the Internet sending e-mails. But because they used an American provider, the e-mails were not intercepted until the NSA filled out paperwork to convince the Justice Department to seek a FISA warrant. The officer said that in one case it took two days to win permission to intercept e-mails that proved valuable. During the debate in Congress last week, some lawmakers noted the need to fix the law so overseas telephone calls routed through the U.S. might be intercepted. What was not discussed publicly was the problem of American-provided e-mail accounts used by terrorists around the world. “Remember the law extended not just to the individual, but where the information on them is housed,” said the officer. “If they have a Yahoo e-mail account and it is stored on a server in the U.S., they are treated like a U.S. resident even if they are a known Iraqi.”2007-08-14-WP-Eggen
Lawsuits May Illuminate Methods of Spy Program By Dan Eggen Washington Post, 2007-08-14 [An excerpt:] In 2003, Room 641A of a large telecommunications building in downtown San Francisco was filled with powerful data-mining equipment for a “special job” by the National Security Agency, according to a former AT&T technician. It was fed by fiber-optic cables that siphoned copies of e-mails and other online traffic from one of the largest Internet hubs in the United States, the former employee says in court filings. What occurred in the room is now at the center of a pivotal legal battle in a federal appeals court over the Bush administration’s controversial spying program, including the monitoring that came to be publicly known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Tomorrow, a three-judge panel will hear arguments on whether the case, which may provide the clearest indication yet of how the spying program has worked, can go forward. So far, evidence in the case suggests a massive effort by the NSA to tap into the backbone of the Internet to retrieve millions of e-mails and other communications, which the government could sift and analyze for suspicious patterns or other signs of terrorist activity, according to court records, plaintiffs’ attorneys and technology experts. “The scale of these deployments is . . . vastly in excess of what would be needed for any likely application or any likely combination of applications, other than surveillance,” says an affidavit filed by J. Scott Marcus, the senior Internet adviser at the Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2005. Marcus analyzed evidence for the plaintiffs in the case. ... Neither AT&T nor the federal government has admitted even the existence of a secret room, and the Justice Department is arguing that the cases should be dismissed because their subject matter is a state secret. The communications company, meanwhile, says it is prevented from properly defending itself because of national security reasons and dismisses the employee who briefly saw the room and worked on supporting equipment as a “line technician who . . . never had access to the ‘secret room’ he purports to describe.”Michael Scheuer on Leaks
Michael Scheuer, who headed the unit within the CIA charged with tracking bin Laden from its inception in 1996 until 1999, has written extensively on the subject of leaks and what they mean for the IC and for the nation’s security in his Imperial Hubris. Because I feel his views on this subject are so important, and because I myself agree so wholeheartedly with what he says, his remarks are reproduced below.IH 6.4: Leaks: Hubris or Treason?
[IH, Section 6.4, pages 192–199; some emphasis and comments in this color have been added, along with minor reformatting and numbering of the eleven paragraphs.][6.4.1] Leaking classified intelligence to journalists, even the most highly classified, has long been common among senior U.S. government officials, politicians, civil servents, and senior military officers. From the vantage point of the author’s career, there has been a marked acceleration in such leaking over the past decade, with the Washington Times being the leading acquirer of such data from its obviously high-level [why is this obvious?] federal government contacts. That it does so whether the administration is Republican or Democratic, moreover, suggests it has strong ties to senior civil servants and military officers immune to electoral vagaries—and, apparently, the tug of conscience. Beyond the growing volume of leaks, there has been a sharp increase in leaking data that has no clear purpose in terms of shaping U.S. domestic or foreign policies but seems rather a form of bragging to the world and the enemy about what we know and how we know it.
[6.4.2] Overall, there is an accelerating tendency to leak for leaking’s sake, spurred by motives ranging from
- juvenile (officials currying favor with reporters), to
- ignorant (the post-11 September influx of federal, state, and local agencies unaccustomed to using classified data), to
- malicious (those outvoted in the cabinet, sub-cabinet, or National Security Council who decide to pursue a personal agenda and do not care about compromising sources and methods,
thereby costing America intelligence vital to its defense and
endangering the lives of the assets supplying the information).
[6.4.3] Leaks are a major factor limiting the effectiveness of U.S. efforts to defeat Osama bin Laden, et al. The first serious leak about al Qaeda was in the Washington Times after the [1998-08-20] U.S. cruise missile attack on al Qaeda camps near Khowst, Afghanistan. The attack was in response to the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania thirteen days earlier. In the [1998-08-24] Times article, “senior” U.S. Department of Defense officials revealed that precise U.S. targeting of the camps was based on electronically intercepting bin Laden’s conversations. “In the two weeks following the Aug. 7 attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,” Ernest Blazar wrote in his “Inside the Ring” column, “the United States reaped an intelligence bonanza from intercepted terrorists’ radio and telephone calls.” The senior leaders told Blazar they had not leaked sooner because “it was hoped that terrorists would again use their compromised networks to rally in the wake of the Tomahawk [cruise missile] attacks. Said one U.S. official: ‘We want to see who is still using the same cell phone numbers.’ ” Apparently these genius leakers had decided it was time to make sure the terrorists would not use the phone again. Well, as night follows day, the intelligence community lost this priceless advantage when bin Laden and his men stopped using the phones.
- A direct trail leads
from - the leak that caused the loss of access to bin Laden’s planning conversations
- to
- the surprise attack on 2001-09-11.
This leak, moreover,
initiated a series of al Qaeda leaks that remains in full spate.
[6.4.4]
Because of such dastardly leaks,
the United States cannot fully exploit
its clandestine service’s numerous, often astounding
captures of senior al Qaeda fighters.
From the capture of Abu Zubaydah in 2002-03
to that of Khalid bin Attash in 2003-03,
word of the arrests has been leaked by senior U.S. officials
within days, and often hours, of their occurrence.
In part, the leaks are simply more evidence
of the rivalry raging among the main components of the U.S. intelligence community,
each trying to win the lead role in the anti-al Qaeda war
and, with it, the largest cut of swag from the ever-growing terrorism budget.
Based on my experience working against bin Laden for almost a decade,
I can say with confidence that
the most damaging leaks about al Qaeda
come from the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the White House.
[How does Scheuer know this?]
A reliable rule of thumb for the reader is that
the federal agencies who have done least to protect America from al Qaeda
leak the most to take credit for other’ work and disguise their years of failure.
Indeed, when a history of the U.S. war with bin Laden is written,
Americans will learn not only that
their clandestine service scored all the major victories against al Qaeda,
but that it did so in an environment
where other intelligence-community agencies withheld support
and were deliberately obstructive.
The country-be-damned leaks by these agencies
are meant to deny credit to the clandestine service,
which neither defends itself nor notes its successes in public.
[6.4.5]
More dangerous than intra-bureaucracy war, however,
is the obtuseness of our elites.
The greatest single motivation behind the flood of leaks, I would contend, is
the inability of U.S. leaders—political, military, intelligence, and diplomatic—
and much of the country’s academic and media elites
to give bin Laden’s threat steady, serious attention.
[I don’t see the connection here.]
Yes, there have been huge increases in counterterrorism funding.
Yes, there has been dramatic growth
in technical and human collection against al Qaeda and its allies.
Yes, the number of people working on terrorism has been greatly augmented,
though the augmentees are inexperienced and will be of little use for years
until they learn the issues from a small corps of nearly worn-out veterans.
Yes, America’s leaders talk stridently of fighting the “war on terrorism”
and defeating the “devastating” threat al Qaeda poses to the “Homeland.”
Yes, the Department of Justice is taking protective domestic actions,
ones that sadly appear to restrict some civil liberties
in the name of national security.
[6.4.6]
The potential of the new resources, people, laws, and supportive rhetoric
given to the intelligence community is, unfortunately,
being sapped in a losing battle against Washington’s corps of leakers.
Notwithstanding improved intelligence and the clandestine service’s heroics,
the media landscape is still littered by classified disclosures.
Senior U.S. officials, for example,
- tell USA Today that
“intercepts by the National Security Agency”
aided the capture of Khalid Shayhk Mohammed,
planner of the 2001-09-11 attacks; - tell the Washington Post that
captured al Qaeda fighter and almost-suicide pilot Ramzi bin al-Shibh
is “providing useful information” that will help capture others; - tell the New York Times that
the monitoring of telephone conversation
helped to derail sabotage plans against ARAMCO facilities in Saudi Arabia; - describe the contents of a “top-secret Memorandum of Notification”
to the New Yorker; and - tell the Chicago Tribune how
intercepted communications
allowed the CIA’s armed-UAV—called Predator—
to attack and kill six important al Qaeda members in Yemen.
The list could go on and fill a chapter of its own.
With each leak our post-09-11 effort against al Qaeda is undercut, and
the viability of the most lethal current threat to U.S. national security
is prolonged.
[6.4.7]
Then there is Bob Woodward’s book, Bush at War,
which saps the faith of intelligence officers
in the integrity of their leaders and institutions.
A newly hired U.S. intelligence officer
is inculcated with many beliefs peculiar to his trade.
Prominent among them is one that identifies the media as the enemy,
miscreants who ferret out and publish secrets,
thereby compromising sources and methods and risking lives of assets.
“[Journalists] are the world’s gossips,”
General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote in 1875,
“and gradually drift to the headquarters of some general
who finds it easier to make a reputation at home
than with his own corps or division.
They are also tempted to prophesy events and state facts
which, to an enemy, reveal a purpose in time to guard against it.”
Sherman’s view permeates the lesson taught to new intelligence officers,
and in my case held sway until recently.
For me, however,
a steady erosion in this view began with
the leak of the U.S. ability
to intercept bin Laden’s electronic communications.
As similar leaks multiplied over the last years, I came to wonder
who is the real culprit,
the publisher of the secret or its leaker?
While I still think editors of major U.S. publications
ought to do more self-censoring in terms of publishing classified data,
I am no longer undecided about the enemy.
Mr. Woodward’s book unarguably documents that
the leaker, not the journalist, is the true enemy of U.S. security.
Note, for example, his breezy description of the source base for his book,
a statement so smoothly matter-of-fact
that one tends to forget that those who gave him the information
wantonly broke federal law
and, to use old-fashioned terms,
betrayed a trust and sullied their honor by endangering
human and technical sources,
the intelligence officers handling the assets, and
America’s security.
Woodward explained in his introductory note:
This is an account of President George W. Bush at war
during the first 100 days after the 2001-09-11 terrorist attacks.
The information I obtained for this book includes contemporaneous notes taken during more than 50 National Security Council and other meetings where the most important decisions were discussed and made.
Many direct quotations of the president and the war cabinet members come from these notes.
Other personal notes, memos, calendars, written internal chronologies, transcripts and other documents also were the basis for direct quotations and other parts of this story.
In addition, I interviewed more than 100 people involved in the decision making and the execution of the war....
[BaW, page xi]
[6.4.8]
After reading Mr. Woodward’s Bush at War,
it seems to me that the U.S. officials who either approved or participated in passing the information—in documents or via interviews—that is at the heart of Mr. Woodward’s book
gave an untold measure of aid and comfort to the enemy.
The pages of Bush at War are larded with items that appear to be either
classified intelligence information or
the means of collecting the data,
including, for starters, the following half-dozen:
[DCI George] Tenet had worried that there would be attacks
during the 2001-07-04 celebrations.
Though he didn’t disclose it to [former U.S. Senator David] Boren,
there had been 34 specific communications intercepts
among various bin Laden associates that summer
making declarations such as
“Zero hour is tomorrow” or “Something spectacular is coming.”
[BaW, page 4]
One of the most guarded secrets in the CIA was
the existence of 30 recruited Afghan agents,
operating under the codeword GE/SENIORS,
who had been paid to track bin Laden around Afghanistan for the last three years ....
The CIA had daily secure communications with the “Seniors”....
[BaW, page 6]
Intelligence monitoring had overheard
a number of known bin Laden operatives
congratulating each other after the attacks.
[BaW, page 27]
In a private meeting with the emir of Qatar,
Bush showed how much he was following the signals intelligence,
especially on bin Laden.
“We know Osama bin Laden called his mother,” Bush told the emir.
“One of these days, he’ll make the mistake, and we’ll get him.”
[BaW, page 196]
The Top Secret/Codeword Threat matrix for Monday morning,
2001-10-29,
was filled with dozens of threats, many new and credible,
suggesting an attack in the next week.
All kinds of signals intelligence, SIGINT,
showed that many known al Qaeda lieutenants or operatives
were saying that something big would happen soon.
[BaW, page 269]
Sensitive intelligence showed that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,
the radical element that held the real power [in Iran],
was shipping weapons to the Taleban,
and that it was reaching out to al Qaeda.
[BaW, page 298]
[6.4.9]
Hubris, arrogance, and semantics are, I think,
the reasons for these and most leaks about bin Laden and al Qaeda,
although in Bush at War,
at least one leaker traded classified data
for the chance to have Mr. Woodward unwittingly rewrite
the “facts” about the U.S. government’s pre-09-11 bin Laden-related activities.
Hubris because U.S. officials appear to believe that
America is so superior to our foes that
leaking sensitive data and compromising sources and methods
for political or other reasons will either
escape the enemy’s notice—fat chance—or
that we will simply find a new way to acquire the data lost
when leaks shut the tap.
And because our elites are so full of themselves, they
- think America is invulnerable;
- cannot imagine the rest of the world does not want to be like us; and
- believe an American empire in the twenty-first century
not only is our destiny, but our duty to mankind,
especially to the unwashed, unlettered, undemocratic, unwhite, unshaved, and antifeminist Muslim masses.
[Hmmm ... other than “unwhite,” a certain similiarity must be admitted...]
a polyglot bunch of Arabs wearing robes, sporting scraggily beards,
and squatting around campfires in Afghan deserts and mountains
could pose a mortal threat to the United States.
The elites and other Americans, in the words of the Economist,
“still seem to treat the [09-11] attacks as if they were a single, dreadful event,
like a natural disaster, or a random crime committed against America....”
While covering their behinds with warnings of worse al Qaeda attacks to come,
their disbelief in the threat is marked by
- their readiness to take
heroic-rhetoric-adorned military half-measures or less—
in refusing, for example, to match their rhetoric
with a remorselessly destructive war against al Qaeda—
and - their fatuous claims that better U.S. public diplomacy
will dissuade Muslims from hating and attacking America.
[6.4.10 is omitted]
[6.4.11 partial]
[T]here can be only two definitions of leakers.
They are either
- loyal Americans who do not understand the threat the country faces—
and so feel free to leak for petty personal or institutional reasons—or - damnable traitors deliberately giving the enemy aid and comfort.
the latter should be prosecuted to the extent the law allows.
Miscellaneous Articles
2012-06-11-Carter-leaks-helping-Obama-campaign
Are security leaks aimed at lifting Obama's campaign?by Sara A. Carter
Washington Examiner, 2012-06-11
2015
2015-12-30-WSJ-u-s-spy-net-on-israel-snares-congress
U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares CongressNSA’s targeting of Israeli leaders
swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers
By Adam Entous and Danny Yadron
Wall Street Journal, 2015-12-30 (in WSJ Washington print edition, page A1)
President Barack Obama announced two years ago he would curtail eavesdropping on friendly heads of state after the world learned the reach of long-secret U.S. surveillance programs.
But behind the scenes, the White House decided to keep certain allies under close watch, current and former U.S. officials said. Topping the list was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The U.S., pursuing a nuclear arms agreement with Iran at the time, captured communications between Mr. Netanyahu and his aides that inflamed mistrust between the two countries and planted a political minefield at home when Mr. Netanyahu later took his campaign against the deal to Capitol Hill.
The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears—an “Oh-s— moment,” one senior U.S. official said—that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.
White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”
Stepped-up NSA eavesdropping revealed to the White House how Mr. Netanyahu and his advisers had leaked details of the U.S.-Iran negotiations—learned through Israeli spying operations—to undermine the talks; coordinated talking points with Jewish-American groups against the deal; and asked undecided lawmakers what it would take to win their votes, according to current and former officials familiar with the intercepts.
Before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed much of the agency’s spying operations in 2013, there was little worry in the administration about the monitoring of friendly heads of state because it was such a closely held secret. After the revelations and a White House review, Mr. Obama announced in a January 2014 speech he would curb such eavesdropping.
In closed-door debate, the Obama administration weighed which allied leaders belonged on a so-called protected list, shielding them from NSA snooping. French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders made the list, but the administration permitted the NSA to target the leaders’ top advisers, current and former U.S. officials said. Other allies were excluded from the protected list, including Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of NATO ally Turkey, which allowed the NSA to spy on their communications at the discretion of top officials.
Privately, Mr. Obama maintained the monitoring of Mr. Netanyahu on the grounds that it served a “compelling national security purpose,” according to current and former U.S. officials. Mr. Obama mentioned the exception in his speech but kept secret the leaders it would apply to.
Israeli, German and French government officials declined to comment on NSA activities. Turkish officials didn’t respond to requests Tuesday for comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the NSA declined to comment on communications provided to the White House.
This account, stretching over two terms of the Obama administration,
is based on
interviews with more than two dozen
current and former U.S. intelligence and administration officials
and
reveals for the first time the extent of American spying on the Israeli prime minister.
[My comment:
Why on earth would those U.S. officials want to reveal this,
unless their goal was to stop future such surveillance activities?
In other words, the officials who revealed this are traitors,
helping Israel and hurting the United States.]
Taking office
After Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials gave his national-security team a one-page questionnaire on priorities. Included on the form was a box directing intelligence agencies to focus on “leadership intentions,” a category that relies on electronic spying to monitor world leaders.
The NSA was so proficient at monitoring heads of state that it was common for the agency to deliver a visiting leader’s talking points to the president in advance. “Who’s going to look at that box and say, ‘No, I don’t want to know what world leaders are saying,’ ” a former Obama administration official said.
In early intelligence briefings, Mr. Obama and his top advisers were told what U.S. spy agencies thought of world leaders, including Mr. Netanyahu, who at the time headed the opposition Likud party.
Michael Hayden, who led the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency during the George W. Bush administration, described the intelligence relationship between the U.S. and Israel as “the most combustible mixture of intimacy and caution that we have.”
The NSA helped Israel expand its electronic spy apparatus—known as signals intelligence—in the late 1970s. The arrangement gave Israel access to the communications of its regional enemies, information shared with the U.S. Israel’s spy chiefs later suspected the NSA was tapping into their systems.
When Mr. Obama took office, the NSA and its Israeli counterpart, Unit 8200, worked together against shared threats, including a campaign to sabotage centrifuges for Iran’s nuclear program. At the same time, the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies targeted one another, stoking tensions.
“Intelligence professionals have a saying: There are no friendly intelligence services,” said Mike Rogers, former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
Early in the Obama presidency, for example, Unit 8200 gave the NSA a hacking tool the NSA later discovered also told Israel how the Americans used it. It wasn’t the only time the NSA caught Unit 8200 poking around restricted U.S. networks. Israel would say intrusions were accidental, one former U.S. official said, and the NSA would respond, “Don’t worry. We make mistakes, too.”
In 2011 and 2012, the aims of Messrs. Netanyahu and Obama diverged over Iran. Mr. Netanyahu prepared for a possible strike against an Iranian nuclear facility, as Mr. Obama pursued secret talks with Tehran without telling Israel.
Convinced Mr. Netanyahu would attack Iran without warning the White House, U.S. spy agencies ramped up their surveillance, with the assent of Democratic and Republican lawmakers serving on congressional intelligence committees.
By 2013, U.S. intelligence agencies determined Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t going to strike Iran. But they had another reason to keep watch. The White House wanted to know if Israel had learned of the secret negotiations. U.S. officials feared Iran would bolt the talks and pursue an atomic bomb if news leaked.
The NSA had, in some cases, spent decades placing electronic implants in networks around the world to collect phone calls, text messages and emails. Removing them or turning them off in the wake of the Snowden revelations would make it difficult, if not impossible, to re-establish access in the future, U.S. intelligence officials warned the White House.
Instead of removing the implants, Mr. Obama decided to shut off the NSA’s monitoring of phone numbers and email addresses of certain allied leaders—a move that could be reversed by the president or his successor.
There was little debate over Israel. “Going dark on Bibi? Of course we wouldn’t do that,” a senior U.S. official said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname.
One tool was a cyber implant in Israeli networks that gave the NSA access to communications within the Israeli prime minister’s office.
[Again, why on earth, why in God's name,
would a loyal U.S. citizen reveal the existence of such an implant, if it exists?
If it does, and if they have revealed it,
this information surely gives Israel the knowledge and incentive to find the implant and remove it,
or even worse,
use it to send disinformation and misinformation back to the U.S.
In either case,
there can be no clearer example of revealing "sources and methods",
the revealing of which is prima facie treason.]
Given the appetite for information about Mr. Netanyahu’s intentions during the U.S.-Iran negotiations, the NSA tried to send updates to U.S. policy makers quickly, often in less than six hours after a notable communication was intercepted, a former official said.
Emerging deal
NSA intercepts convinced the White House last year that Israel was spying on negotiations under way in Europe. Israeli officials later denied targeting U.S. negotiators, saying they had won access to U.S. positions by spying only on the Iranians.
By late 2014, White House officials knew Mr. Netanyahu wanted to block the emerging nuclear deal but didn’t know how.
On Jan. 8, John Boehner, then the Republican House Speaker, and incoming Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed on a plan. They would invite Mr. Netanyahu to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress. A day later, Mr. Boehner called Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador, to get Mr. Netanyahu’s agreement.
Despite NSA surveillance, Obama administration officials said they were caught off guard when Mr. Boehner announced the invitation on Jan. 21.
Soon after, Israel’s lobbying campaign against the deal went into full swing on Capitol Hill, and it didn’t take long for administration and intelligence officials to realize the NSA was sweeping up the content of conversations with lawmakers.
The message to the NSA from the White House amounted to: “You decide” what to deliver, a former intelligence official said.
NSA rules governing intercepted communications “to, from or about” Americans date back to the Cold War and require obscuring the identities of U.S. individuals and U.S. corporations. An American is identified only as a “U.S. person” in intelligence reports; a U.S. corporation is identified only as a “U.S. organization.” Senior U.S. officials can ask for names if needed to understand the intelligence information.
The rules were tightened in the early 1990s to require that intelligence agencies inform congressional committees when a lawmaker’s name was revealed to the executive branch in summaries of intercepted communications.
A 2011 NSA directive said direct communications between foreign intelligence targets and members of Congress should be destroyed when they are intercepted. But the NSA director can issue a waiver if he determines the communications contain “significant foreign intelligence.”
The NSA has leeway to collect and disseminate intercepted communications involving U.S. lawmakers if, for example, foreign ambassadors send messages to their foreign ministries that recount their private meetings or phone calls with members of Congress, current and former officials said.
“Either way, we got the same information,” a former official said, citing detailed reports prepared by the Israelis after exchanges with lawmakers.
During Israel’s lobbying campaign in the months before the deal cleared Congress in September, the NSA removed the names of lawmakers from intelligence reports and weeded out personal information. The agency kept out “trash talk,” officials said, such as personal attacks on the executive branch.
Administration and intelligence officials said the White House didn’t ask the NSA to identify any lawmakers during this period.
“From what I can tell, we haven’t had a problem with how incidental collection has been handled concerning lawmakers,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He declined to comment on any specific communications between lawmakers and Israel.
The NSA reports allowed administration officials to peer inside
Israeli efforts to turn Congress against the deal.
Mr. Dermer was described as coaching unnamed U.S. organizations—
which officials could tell from the context were Jewish-American groups—
on lines of argument to use with lawmakers,
and Israeli officials were reported pressing lawmakers to oppose the deal.
[Of course, if U.S. officials try to influence Israeli politics,
American Jews get outraged.
In my opinion, the Jewish majority is totally hypocritical about this and so many other matters,
such as immigration ("Good for the U.S., bad for Israel.").]
“These allegations are total nonsense,” said a spokesman for the Embassy of Israel in Washington.
A U.S. intelligence official familiar with the intercepts said Israel’s pitch to undecided lawmakers often included such questions as: “How can we get your vote? What’s it going to take?”
NSA intelligence reports helped the White House figure out which Israeli government officials had leaked information from confidential U.S. briefings. When confronted by the U.S., Israel denied passing on the briefing materials.
The agency’s goal was “to give us an accurate illustrative picture of what [the Israelis] were doing,” a senior U.S. official said.
Just before Mr. Netanyahu’s address to Congress in March, the NSA swept up Israeli messages that raised alarms at the White House: Mr. Netanyahu’s office wanted details from Israeli intelligence officials about the latest U.S. positions in the Iran talks, U.S. officials said.
A day before the speech, Secretary of State John Kerry made an unusual disclosure. Speaking to reporters in Switzerland, Mr. Kerry said he was concerned Mr. Netanyahu would divulge “selective details of the ongoing negotiations.”
The State Department said Mr. Kerry was responding to Israeli media reports that Mr. Netanyahu wanted to use his speech to make sure U.S. lawmakers knew the terms of the Iran deal.
Intelligence officials said the media reports allowed the U.S. to put Mr. Netanyahu on notice without revealing they already knew his thinking. The prime minister mentioned no secrets during his speech to Congress.
In the final months of the campaign, NSA intercepts yielded few surprises. Officials said the information reaffirmed what they heard directly from lawmakers and Israeli officials opposed to Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign—that the prime minister was focused on building opposition among Democratic lawmakers.
The NSA intercepts, however, revealed one surprise.
Mr. Netanyahu and some of his allies voiced confidence they could win enough votes.
[End of article.]
2017
2017-05-22-Buchanan-special-prosecutor-criminal-leaks
A Special Prosecutor for Criminal Leaksby Patrick Buchanan
buchanan.org, 2017-05-22
Who is the real threat to the national security?
Is it President Trump who shared with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov the intelligence that ISIS was developing laptop bombs to put aboard airliners?
Or is it The Washington Post that ferreted out and published this code-word intelligence, and splashed the details on its front page, alerting the world, and ISIS, to what we knew.
...
Those who leaked this to hurt Trump, and those who published this in the belief it would hurt Trump, sees themselves as the “Resistance” — like the French Resistance to Vichy in World War II.
,,,
The adversary press asserts in its actions a right to collude with and shelter disloyal and dishonorable officials who violate our laws by leaking secrets that they are sworn to protect.
Why do these officials become criminals, and why do the mainstream media protect them?
Because this seedy bargain is the best way to advance their common interests.
The media get the stolen goods to damage Trump. Anti-Trump officials get their egos massaged, their agendas advanced and their identities protected.
This is the corrupt bargain the Beltway press has on offer.
For the media, bringing down Trump is also good for business. TV ratings of anti-Trump media are soaring. The “failing New York Times” has seen a surge in circulation. The Pulitzers are beckoning.
And bringing down a president is exhilarating. As Ben Bradlee reportedly said during the Iran-Contra scandal that was wounding President Reagan, “We haven’t had this much fun since Watergate.”
...
When Trump gets home from his trip, he should direct Justice to establish an office inside the FBI to investigate all illegal leaks since his election and all security leaks that are de facto felonies, and name a special prosecutor to head up the investigation.
Then he should order that prosecutor to determine if any Trump associates, picked up by normal security surveillance, were unmasked, and had their names and conversations spread through the intel community, on the orders of Susan Rice and Barack Obama, to seed the bureaucracy to sabotage the Trump presidency before it began.
2017-05-23-WP-Gerson-in-trumps-house-of-betrayal-leaks-are-business-as-usual-thats-a-big-problem
In Trump’s house of betrayal, leaks are business as usual. That’s a big problem.by Michael Gerson
Washington Post, 2017-05-23
...
How in God’s name did the reporter gain access to a discussion in the Oval Office? According to the article, the “memcon” — the memorandum of conversation — was “read to The New York Times by an American official.”
Let that sink in. This is a document of very limited distribution. According to sources I consulted, it typically would not have even been given to the director of the CIA. This was a leak of an extremely sensitive and highly classified document by a very senior person.
[Another possibility: Some low to mid level staff person performing administrative duties.]
Labels: leaks
posted by KHarbaugh at 20:00
