Cross Your Fingers

(FP’ed 4 AM EDT, Wednesday October 10, 2007

– promoted by exmearden)

…These Guys Are Getting WORSE.

Have a look at this:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

To quote the wise one: ‘I have a bad feeling about this…’

This company, SITE, is something I had no idea existed:

SITE — an acronym for the Search for International Terrorist Entities — was established in 2002 with the stated goal of tracking and exposing terrorist groups, according to the company’s Web site. (Rita) Katz, an Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s, has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest.

“We were able to establish sources that provided us with unique and important information into al-Qaeda’s hidden world,” Katz said. Her company’s income is drawn from subscriber fees and contracts.

Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.

But our guys blew their cover. After providing this information for free, our ‘intelligence’ agencies downloaded dozens of copies of the video. And then…

…By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News’s Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. “This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document,” Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.

Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

This is not a good sign. The current administration’s insistence on filling government positions with Loyal Bushies in every nook and cranny means we have idiots running the show everywhere you look.

If they can’t manage keeping a simple secret like this, how are we supposed to trust them to manage anything we may be able to force them to do thanks to our congressional majority? Imaging these clowns trying to manage the orderly exit of Iraq, for example.

Alternatively, if this was done for political reasons, the same question applies.

The only possible silver lining of our inept and craven congress is that by doing nothing, they inadvertently prevent Bush and Co. from fucking things up even more spectacularly. Small condolences, I know, but these people are getting even worse at their jobs as time goes by. Perhaps they all are spending time brushing up their resumes rather that doing their damn jobs.

We need a new government today. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen between now and January 2009, but I worry about these fools. More and more each day, I worry.