Leaking Intelligence Info to Keep the Threat Level High

This is just amazing and is yet another example of the Bush administration using terror threats to keep a constant sense of fear among the public instead of doing everything they can to keep us safe.

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release...A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document."

As Hunter said, "When your entire foreign policy expertise is based on leaking information to Fox News in order to keep the population in a constant state of low-level fear, sometimes you have to blow actual intelligence information in order to do it."

Keith Olbermann discussed this with a counter-terrorism expert, Evan Kohlman, on his show Tuesday.

OLBERMANN: ...when something like this happens, and it‘s not the first time, do you sit there in your office and say I‘m not sure this administration wants to actually do that grind-it-out work of counterterrorism. It just wants to see nice headlines about what a great job they are doing?

KOHLMANN: There does seem to be unfortunate tendency that when there are victories in the war on terrorism or a speech by Osama bin Laden or something really, you know, that generates fear, there seems to be a tendency to focus on that, rather than focusing on the kind of more nuanced here is al Qaeda, here is what they are planning, here is what they have said.

We don‘t want to resort to hysteria. And the last thing we want to do is spread al Qaeda‘s message the way that they want us to which is spreading a transcript to the American people. There was nothing in this bin Laden video that had any value that Americans needed to read it then and there. So, to help distribute it to Americans, you are just helping al Qaeda in their mission.

I can't wait to hear's Sporer's attempt to spin this one.