According to an article in the WaPo, three top officials at the US Department of Homeland Security caused a major leak of classified information, the most recent OBL video in fact, and wrecked literally years worth of intelligence work made by SITE, a private security service.
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month,... 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.
Verifying the damage done by these nincompoops;
"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder....
And who were the leakers?
White House counsel Fred F. Fielding,... Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security [and] Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.
Yet another example of deft handling of the highest priority security concerns of the United States by the Republican administration. Only Republicans could have screwed this up so badly. How have they earned a reputation for being good with such things? They are clearly mentally challenged and unable to contain their enthusiasm about anything terrorist, not even long enough to catch Bin Laden.
The Republican Administration is quite cavalier about the whole thing:
...Government officials... said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.
... officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The US may have its own worker bees, but had any of them gotten this close to Bin Laden yet?
They will never admit it: Due to typical Republican intelligence incompetence, the closest link to Bin Laden since Tora Bora is broken.
This is another major blunder committed by politically appointed Homeland Security staff. No career intelligence officer would have spammed his entire department with a top-secret Bin Laden link, and only a Republican would leak it to Fox:
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.
We can all guess what the motivations were for the leak: Desire to drum up Binladenmania, making or cementing a contact with the press, distracting the public from anything else that might be going on, etc. Right now, in fact, Bush is putting us on notice that Al Qaeda is up to something again, and we'd better get scared in a hurry.
This leak must be investigated by congress. Light must shine and the whole story must be revealed: How did so many people commit such a classified security blunder? Will anyone be prosecuted? I guess its not a crime if lots of people do it, or if your political party affiliation happens to begin with the letter "R".
If nothing else, this will support America's perception, come next election day, that Republicans cannot be trusted with anything.