"It is precisely when the great democratic nations of the West are in the process of deciding their future peacefully, through the ballot box, they become vulnerable to terror."
Mole Row Reveals U.S. Intelligence DisarrayTue Aug 10, 2004 09:55 AM ET
By Jon Boyle
PARIS (Reuters) - The unmasking of an al Qaeda mole after a U.S. security alert points to disarray within U.S. intelligence and could mean President Bush is accused of playing politics with security, the top U.S. election issue.
Washington raised its security alert to high on August 1 and disclosed a man held in secret by Pakistan was the source of information that justified the alert.
U.S. officials next morning confirmed a media report naming the man as Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, a computer expert arrested secretly in July and used by Pakistan to track down al Qaeda militants in Britain and America.
Pakistani intelligence told Reuters that Khan was still working undercover when the U.S. security status was raised to orange and his name appeared in a U.S. newspaper.
Security analysts said the outing of the source was a major blunder that forced Britain to arrest 12 terrorism suspects in a hurry; nine are still in custody. Washington said the arrests, which included an alleged top al Qaeda figure, were a success.
Anthony Glees, director of Brunel University's Center for Intelligence and Security Studies, London, said compared to MI5, Britain's domestic spy agency, U.S. intelligence gathering was "in a state of some disarray."
"America is getting the worst of all possible worlds. On the one hand it needs to show itself alert to the security dangers and as gathering intelligence as fast as it can ... On the other hand, it is doing this against a track record of discord, disharmony and failure," he said.
David Wright-Neville, of the Monash Global Terrorism Research Unit, said that if Khan was still an active al Qaeda mole when his name was leaked, his loss was a serious blow.
"If it's true, at the very least it would suggest a breakdown in communication between the Pakistanis and the Americans," the Melbourne-based security expert said.
"At worst, it smacks of political opportunism and, if that is indeed the case, it suggests that political survival ranks more highly than generating potentially valuable information on the extent of the network."
CAPITOL QUESTIONS
A U.S. senators from both major parties have already demanded the White House explain why Khan's name was leaked to the press. Charles Schumer (Dem. NY) said the outing of Khan may have hurt the war on terror.
Security is the top issue of the U.S. presidential election, and although Democrat challenger John Kerry has stopped short of accusing Bush of playing politics with the issue, critics say Bush is vulnerable to the charge.
A British security source said that even if the raising of the US security status was not political, "they did it in a fairly clumsy way, opening themselves up to such criticism."
Claude Moniquet, head of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, said the United States was notoriously bad at cooperating on security, even with allies. But if politicians did sometimes use intelligence for political gain, recent maulings meant they were unlikely to go along with that now.
"They have already had to carry the can for the politicians over preparations for the war in Iraq, so I don't think they would continue to do so," the Brussels-based expert said.
POST 9/11 TRAUMA
Glees said the Khan controversy highlighted the failure of the United States to deal with the trauma of the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. landmarks that killed almost 3,000 people.
"9/11 was a seismic catastrophe and the ripples are still being felt. It was a bit like Chernobyl (nuclear reactor explosion in 1986) and Communism -- it threw into stark relief all the problems America faces in the post-Cold War world.
"This is the election of 9/11 and the very fact that Kerry has taken up the challenge that the fight on terror really is the most important issue just shows that America is at the moment tottering.
"It is precisely when the great democratic nations of the West are in the process of deciding their future peacefully, through the ballot box, they become vulnerable to terror."
posted by Richard at
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
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