Is there no end to the stupidity the new administration will demonstrate to the world? One thing no one would argue is that President George W Bush kept this country safe. And his team did so by quietly – well outside the limelight – chasing down our enemies and disrupting their plans. He did this quietly so we had a chance of catching them, never letting on we had them in our sights, never bragging about how we got them so they could learn to evade our security nets.

But not Team Obama! Hell no, their promise of transparency seems to be directed at letting everyone in on our national security details, so our enemies can take defensive actions and our agents and allies face deadly reprisals. 

This news leak/article deserves a good fisking to illustrate how Obama may be leading this year’s Darwin Awards, for the act of taking a whole nation to the brink of extinction:

American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain.

They believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under the visa waiver programme is the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on American soil.

Intelligence briefings for Mr Obama have detailed a dramatic escalation in American espionage in Britain, where the CIA has recruited record numbers of informants in the Pakistani community to monitor the 2,000 terrorist suspects identified by MI5, the British security service.

Emphasis mine. So we are now all being let in on Obama’s intelligence briefings – how wonderful.

I am not surprised to hear the Pakistani communities across the west represent a danger spot – I mean Duh! We are attacking the last major redoubt of al Qaeda in the tribal regions of Pakistan. The entire world’s efforts to snuff out al Qaeda and their Taliban cousins is not focused on Afghanistan – that is just where we have avenues of retreat blocked off. All efforts are focused on Pakistan. 

Reporting these communities represent a threat is probably semi-harmless. But pointing out the CIA and MI-5 are recruiting spies amongst these communities is deadly naive. Whatever cells are there are now cleansing their ranks, maybe violently. If we see a spike in violence we will know. But more to the point, whatever terrorist cell members that were hiding out in these communities are now rolling up and going dormant – now that someone conveniently broadcast a warning to them. They will go dark to us.

A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.

…

The CIA has already spent 18 months developing a network of agents in Britain to combat al-Qaeda, unprecedented in size within the borders of such a close ally, according to intelligence sources in both London and Washington.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama, told The Sunday Telegraph:“The British Pakistani community is recognised as probably al-Qaeda’s best mechanism for launching an attack against North America.

And now this Klieg-Light moth from Team Obama – Bruce Riedel – has provided even more helpful information. Anyone who has joined a cell or become a confidant in the last 18 months is possibly a CIA agent. Now that is one quick way to filter out people you don’t want around.

And whoever is yapping across The Pond has exposed the fact that 40% of the CIA’s assets are now in the UK, leaving many other areas less covered, if covered at all. This kind of information is strategic gold (if true). It allows cells in the UK to go dormant and cells in Canada or elsewhere to go active. It also tells cells not linked to the Pakistani community they may be more free to act.

This is WHY we don’t send out media alerts on intelligence actions and results.

Information gleaned by CIA spies in Britain has already helped thwart several terrorist attacks in the UK and was instrumental in locating Rashid Rauf, a British-born al-Qaeda operative implicated in a plot to explode airliners over the Atlantic, who was tracked down and killed in a US missile strike in November.

But some US intelligence officers are irritated that valuable manpower and resources have been diverted to the UK. One former intelligence officer who does contract work for the CIA dismissed Britain as a “swamp” of jihadis.

Jonathan Evans, the director general of MI5, admitted in January that the Security Service alone does not have the resources to maintain surveillance on all its targets. “We don’t have anything approaching comprehensive coverage,” he said.

The dramatic escalation in CIA activity in the UK followed the exposure in August 2006 of Operation Overt, the alleged airline bomb plot.

…

For their part, some British officials are queasy that information obtained by the CIA from British Pakistanis was used to help target Mr Rauf, a British citizen, whom they would have preferred to capture and bring to trial.

Again, as was the case with the NSA-FISA exposure, and the treasury tracking of money exposure, there are forces inside the intelligence community trying to take over national policy through news media proxies. And when this happens the only ones who really benefit are the terrorists, who exploit these internal divisions.

Somehow I don’t get the issue – Jihadis are what we are hunting? If Britain (and one would assume Canada and Australia) are full of our enemies, and we know it, and we are/were watching them, that is all good! Why write about it for all to see and adapt?

Obama better get control of the administration and fast. Anymore stories like this and our agents and contacts might was well have scarlet letters on their foreheads, for all the good they will be.

To summarize, this one story provided numerous key bits of intelligence to our enemies:

• US has been recruiting contacts and spies within the UK Pakistani communities, so terrorist cells know to look for agents.
• US has been creating this network for 18 months, so terrorists cells know when spies may have been recruited.
• US/UK have their eyes on this community, so cells there should go dark.
• The US has an enormous segment of their resources focused on the UK, thus cells outside this region could be activated with less chance of detection.
• The US/UK are focused on Pakistan related communities, leaving other potential trouble spots less covered.
• The US/UK is evaluating another airliner attack scenario.

That is a horribly large amount of information to expose to our enemies. Now we can only hope it was misinformation – which leads to a whole lot of other issues. Bottom line: by allowing our enemies to learn what we are doing, Team Obama gave them the opportunity to adapt. And everyone has a chance to adapt and evade detections, gives our enemies more of a chance to hit us.

Tags: al-Qaeda, CIA, Jihadis, MI-5, Obama, Pakistan, UK