Administration outs agent

No, not this one.

I already posted this in a quick link section because I was too tired to do more with it. I've now given it its own thread so I can add more.

The Bush Administration blew an undercover operation under pressure to prove the latest terror warnings were justified. Bush's clearly puts his reelection campaign before national security.

"If it's true that the Americans have unintentionally revealed the identity of another nation's intelligence agent, who appears to be working in the good of all of us, that is not only a fundamental intelligence flaw. It's also a monumental foreign relations blunder," security expert Paul Beaver, a former publisher of Jane's Defense Weekly, told Reuters.

Juan Cole has more.

Juan Cole now has even more:

On Sunday at around 12:30 pm, Wolf Blitzer's show referred to it. New York Senator Charles Schumer criticized the Bush administration for revealing Khan's name. He noted the annoyance of British Home Minister Blunkett (see below) and Pakistani Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat with the Americans for blowing Khan's cover. He said Hayat complained that if Khan's name had not been reveaeled to the New York Times by the Bush administration, he might well have provided information that would have led to the capture of Usamah Bin Laden himself!

Nice work, fellas.

*Still more* I'm not sure how I ended up there, but I was reading a post at Rantingprof. He makes the claim that it was Pakistan that outed the agent first, not the US, and points to a Reuters story entitled "Unmasking of Qaeda Mole a U.S. Security Blunder." I guess he is smarter than Reuters to see what they did not.

Reuters learned from Pakistani intelligence sources on Friday that computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, arrested secretly in July, was working under cover to help the authorities track down al Qaeda militants in Britain and the United States when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

The article is dated Sat, Aug 7th. Go back and look. It would be very sloppy of Reuters to refer to a day over a week ago as simply "Friday." And when did the story that Khan was undercover first get reported? I believe it was two days ago. That would be Friday, Aug 6th. Probably the Friday Reuters refered to.

Also if we go back to the original article I linked to, the one on MSNBC, we find this(emphesis added):

But Pakistani intelligence courses have said that the al-Qaida suspect named by U.S. officials as the source of information that led to the heightened state of alert was working undercover. By naming the suspect, the United States forced Pakistan to put an end to the sting operation and forced it to hide the man in a secret location.

Finally I would point out there has been no rebuttal to these claims from government officals.