Most of the blogging discussing National Security Adviser Rice’s appearance on Sunday morning talk shows centers on her admission that the Bush administration’s outing of double agent Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, which blew a sting operation against al Qaeda.
From CNN’s Late Edition:
BLITZER: Let’s talk about some of the people who have been picked up, mostly in Pakistan, over the last few weeks. In mid-July, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. There is some suggestion that by releasing his identity here in the United States, you compromised a Pakistani intelligence sting operation, because he was effectively being used by the Pakistanis to try to find other al Qaeda operatives. Is that true?
RICE: Well, I don’t know what might have been going on in Pakistan. I will say this, that we did not, of course, publicly disclose his name. One of them…
BLITZER: He was disclosed in Washington on background.
RICE: On background. And the problem is that when you’re trying to strike a balance between giving enough information to the public so that they know that you’re dealing with a specific, credible, different kind of threat than you’ve dealt with in the past, you’re always weighing that against kind of operational considerations. We’ve tried to strike a balance. We think for the most part, we’ve struck a balance, but it’s indeed a very difficult balance to strike.
Another bungling due to incompetence.
A couple minutes after that admission, I was also struck by this weird comment:
BLITZER: And you’re still fearful that they, the terrorists, might want to do in the United States what they did in Spain, on the eve of their national elections, disrupt an elections process?
RICE: Yes. Absolutely, we’re concerned about it, and I think the terrorists need to believe and to understand that the American people are going to react very badly to any attempt to disrupt our electoral process. But I think that in some of their minds, this is a possibility, and we’ve indeed picked up discussion of trying to do something in the pre-election period.
That’s why it is so critical for Tom Ridge to do what he did. We have a duty to warn. The president has always said that when he had specific information as to a place, or a method, or a time, that he would inform the American people. And it’s inconceivable to me that we would not have informed the Citigroup or the New York Stock Exchange or the World Bank that known terrorists have cased their buildings.
Uh, exactly how would American voters “react very badly”? Let’s say there were five truck bombings in October which killed 300 people. What would this “bad” reaction to the terrorism be?
Let me guess: the terrorists support Senator Kerry. So if they attack we will all rally around our steady leader Bush and re-elect him. Which would of course be bad for al Qaeda because he has destroyed there operations in Iraq.
Is that about right?