Counterterrorism: You're Doing It Wrong

Today the Washington Post reports that the SITE Institute, a private intelligence analysis firm that tracks international terrorist activity, had managed to procure September's al-Qaeda video early via their investigations of the group.

SITE offered it to the Bush administration for pre-emptive analysis, so that when al-Qaeda released the video the Bush administration would be ready with message, with facts, and with a detailed rundown of what the video meant and how it affected the War on Terror. Rather than keeping it under wraps until al-Qaeda's planned release date as SITE requested, within hours the government had leaked the tape to the press.

Private intelligence analysis is a booming business, and each individual firm protects their sources and methods. If they don't and those sources and methods are revealed, they are no longer useful, and a firm may spend several years building a reliable network only to have trusted sources and available methods disappear overnight when something comes out improperly or at the wrong time. So you can guess what happened.

Whatever methods SITE used to access al-Qaeda computer networks was shut off, and now a valuable and reliable source of intelligence on what many believe to be America's greatest enemy is now shut off. Stories like this drive me nuts. In a situation where it would have been so very easy to be effective and gain something, the Bush administration instead decided to destroy any extant utility.

And why? For a perceived victory in releasing al-Qaeda's tape before al-Qaeda wanted to? "We have reliable sources watching al-Qaeda!" the gesture seemed to say, while reducing that same reliable source to a useless remnant. This is not the way to do anything, let alone combat transnational terrorism.