The apparent leak of the name of AQ doubleagent Khan has moved up the scale from eyebrow-raiser to controversy, but has yet to achieve scandal status. Here are some updates.
First of all, the story makes the Washington Post today, where Dan Froomkin (scroll down for item) avers that he's "still not clear about how or why administration officials leaked the name of an al Qaeda computer expert who was cooperating with investigators."
He quotes Rice saying on Blitzer's show that "we did not, of course, publicly disclose his name," but calls her out on her inference that the name itself was made public by the administration, which sought to cloak only its own discosure of the agent's identity! As Froomkin says, "an "on background" disclosure is still a disclosure -- that only means reporters can't fully identify the source."
Froomkin also links to a new AP report that "senior officials said Tuesday that some al-Qaida fugitives escaped after news reports revealed the arrest of a computer expert for Osama bin Laden's network who was cooperating with investigators."
Then there's an LA Times story on how White House leaks on terror anger our allies, which includes the Khan affair, but spins Rice's statement over the weekend as a denial that the administration leaked the name. Go figure.
For some measure of clarification, we can turn to Mickey Kaus. I know most of you have decided to hate Kaus, but he is good at parsing this sort of budding scandal, if only to set a bar for arguments that show that yes, Mickey, it really does matter. After the jump I'll quote Kaus's analysis so you won't have to give him hits.
Thus Kaus:
Not so fast, Senor Schumer! I've been asking myself: Why isn't the mainstream press making a bigger fuss about the possibility that by leaking the news of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan's capture, someone in the Bush administration did incalculable damage to the effort to roll up Al Qaeda? Khan had apparently been "turned" and was acting as a double agent. The Brits and the Pakistanis seem to be mad at the leak-- and certainly the leak of Khan's name seems vastly more important than the outing of the CIA's Valerie Plame, who was not endangered because she was not operating as a covert agent, or Sen. Richard Shelby's possible 2002 leak of a six-month-old Al Qaeda message. .... If the administration did give out the name for political reasons (i.e., to justify its terror alerts)--something that many suggest--that would and should be a huge, potentially election-tipping scandal.
But ... maybe we (and especially Reuters) are getting carried away here. Take a closer look at the sourcing in the original New York Times piece disclosing Khan's name, which was written by Douglas Jehl and David Rohde. They cite a "senior United States official" for details on the documentary evidence found after the capture of a suspect, but this "United States official" is pointedly not cited as having given the name of the suspect. Instead, a few paragraphs further down, the Times reporters tell us:
"The American officials would say only that the Qaeda figure whose capture had led to the discovery of the documentary evidence had been captured with the help of the C.I.A. Though Pakistan announced the arrest last week of a Qaeda member, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted in connection with the bombings of American embassies in East Africa in 1998, the American officials suggested that he had not been the source of the new threat information.
"An account provided by a Pakistani intelligence official made clear that the crucial capture in recent weeks had been that of Mr. Khan, who is also known as Abu Talha. The intelligence official provided information describing Mr. Khan as having assisted in evaluating potential American and Western targets for terrorist attacks, and as being representative of a ''new Al Qaeda.''
The story seems to be almost explicitly pointing to Pakistani sources--not American officials--as the ones who first gave out Khan's name. (The American source is then cited as neither confirming nor denying the name the reporters ask him about.)
As both the Globe and Juan Cole note, the transcript of the background briefing given by U.S. officials on August 1 does not contain Khan's name. What evidence is there, then, that Bush administration officials, as opposed to Pakistanis, were the negligent parties here? Well, there's Condi Rice's oafish interview with Wolf Blitzer, in which she seems to be saying that the Administration gave out Khan's name on background. But her office now denies this is what she meant, and it's possible she was just being exceptionally clumsy. There's also the Reuters report, cited earlier, which says that "Pakistani sources" blame U.S. officials. But couldn't the Pakistanis be trying to divert the blame to the Americans? More important, note that even these Pakistani sources, according to Reuters, say that the Bush administration "confirmed" Khan's name, not that the Bushies are the ones who leaked it in the first place. It seems entirely possible that once Khan's name was out in Monday's NYT-- and Khan had been moved to a safe house--Bush administration officials felt there was no point in sticking with their refusal to confirm his name. (That scenario jibes with this earlier Reuters report.)
It's also possible that even confirming the name after it was out was a horrible mistake that gave the al Qaeda suspects an unnecessary head start. And it's possible that the Bushies gave out so many details about the captive that he was easy to identify. Maybe Jehl and Rohde were disguising their sources, deflecting blame from the U.S. administration. I'll be quite willing to condemn the Bushies if in fact they outed Khan--even if it wasn't intentional, it would at least be grossly negligent, and someone (maybe Bush) would deserve to be fired for it. But the surface evidence from the original source--the Times' piece--points to a Pakistani official, not a Bush official, as the culprit. ... Paranoid kicker: It's not as if there aren't officials who sympathize with radical Islamic fundamentalism in the Pakistani intelligence service. ...
[Note: If someone was smart enough to preserve a free, permanent "Userland" link to the original August 2 Jehl/Rohde piece, I'd love to have it so I can post it. Update: Done. Thanks to Robert Tagorda for the link.]
Update: See also John Marzan's similar comments on Vodkapundit's site. [v. Insta]
Update 2: Why didn't the administration ask the NYT not to publish the Khan's name on national security grounds? (One possible answer is that they did. Another possible answer is that they didn't because they were happy to get the news out for political reasons--which would make them culpable.)
Update 3: Alert reader J.R. sees a deeper game, suggesting that the Bushies may not have minded that the Times published Khan's name:
Having served in Military Intelligence, I am never one to ascribed clever thinking too our intelligence services. However, I did read that Khan became suspect by Al Qaeda after the first few arrests based on his information. Hence, his value as a double agent was diminished.
On the other hand, having of much of Al Qaeda suddenly suspecting all the instruction and information they have received over the past few months after they read the New York Times last week,; priceless. Esp. when the threat level is high and attacks are suspected to be in the final planning stages.
This could have been the best and only way to quickly disrupt plans that we did not have enough information on to disrupt directly.
So, it may have been deliberate. Even it were deliberate, most parties involved would not know that, and the finger pointing and backstabbing in trying to apportion blame make it all the more realistic.
Fingerpointing and backstabbing--We Do Our Share! ... Howard Dean, Under Deep Cover: But wouldn't Al Qaeda know with some precision the date on which Khan was "turned" (and hence the date his emails became suspect)? Or have our background briefings--and Howard Dean's why'd-Bush-wait-three-weeks accusations!--cannily moved up Khan's arrest date to cast suspicion on all the email's since early July?
Kaus seems to me to miss the simplest explanation: that administration officials leaked Khan's name under the condition that the journalists to whom they leaked it not attribute the leak to them.
The sort of imprecise but suggestive construction Kaus points to as suggesting the leak came from the Pakistanis is in fact routinely used by journalists to disguise the actual source of information from a source who doesn't want to be fingered as the leaker.
If this is the case, the leak came not only in a "backgrounder," but also "on background." (Two distinct concepts in journalism, whose terminological similarity might account for Rice's confusion in the Blitzer interview.)
What might clear this up would be some aggressive, sustained questioning of Rice by a news show host. But somehow, I'm not holding my breath waiting for Little Russ to do the job.