  Reuters' London office is reporting that the owner of that laptop from which the information was gathered that prompted the address-specific terror threat level hike had been working to snare other al-Qaeda operatives when his name was released by the press. The story, urlLink Unmasking of Qaeda mole a security blunder , says Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan had been captured in July, but had continued contact with other al-Qaeda members in cooperation with Pakistani intelligence. That is until he was outed last weekend in the rush by the press to spin the anti-terror activity as orchestrated events by the Bush Administration.
As with most intelligence operations, secrecy is vital. Sources are undercover for a reason: Without them, you have no human intelligence. However, harping about the age of the information and whether there was an attack pending pushed the U.S. to say there was a source in custody. That was bad enough. Then the NY Times dug around until they found out who it was, releasing the name regardless of the consequences to ongoing operations. There is a constant collision in times of war between the freedom of the press, the right of the American people to know what all's going on, and the long-term safety and freedom of the U.S. as a whole. Unfortunately, too many journalists and media outlets have lost sight of that. And this is not necessarily a left/right issue; let me simply say Geraldo Rivera to show any journalist can be stupid. As a result of the Khan leak, the U.K. had to push up operations to take into custody many operatives, though they had had them under surveilance to hopefully cast a wider net.
Instead, we have who we have and only who we have in custody, and will have to spend some serious time or fall upon some serious luck to gain the intelligence position we had until last weekend. Here's what gets me the most: The people who pushed the hands of the intelligence communities in the U.S. and U.K. to round up all these people are the same ones who say that this round-up was orchestrated to put the Republican party back in the spotlight after the DNC.
Come on, now. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. The press, namely the NY Times outed a source in a similar fashion to the outing of Ambassador Wilson's wife, undermining ongoing operations directly tied to the security of the United States. How come no one is crying foul? urlLink Read more! 
