Obama administration uses Underwear Bomb² for politics

Remember how the left was absolutely livid when known-CIA employee Valerie Plame was “outed” by “someone” in the Bush administration? We’ve got a much more serious situation now, since the Obama administration outed a real undercover operative working with us in the War on Terror.

But the little outrage you hear is from stoic American citizens like Mark Levin and conservative bloggers. The left and the media say nothing. Here’s a clip from Levin’s show late last week.

But the story does not end there. The first meme was that the Obama administration’s CIA led the effort to recruit a double-agent. Then it was the double-agent approaching the CIA with information. Then we heard the agent was a Saudi. Certainly the CIA was probably involved, but most of their involvement was hyped-up bull shit. The mole was a British national of Saudi decent living in Yemen and working with British intelligence

Just a week ago the establishment media was aflutter with news that a CIA double-agent had thwarted a new type of underwear bomb attack targeting U.S. flights in a plot devised by al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula.

But as the week progressed, a developing bombshell story got buried under President Obama’s gay marriage announcement. Not only is the supposed CIA asset not a CIA asset at all, but the entire operation was exposed prematurely and the double-agent’s life was immediately threatened by an intelligence leak that very well may have come out of the White House for political gain.

As the story broke, the establishment media was more than happy to attribute the intelligence coup to the CIA and the Obama administration, describing the mole as a “CIA informant.”

It turns out that wasn’t true. The double-agent hadn’t been recruited and placed by the CIA, but by British intelligence, who also managed the operation. In fact, the Americans had only recently been made aware of the joint British-Saudi effort.

Needless to say,members of the intelligence community including British intelligence are pissed off, and rightly so.

The next time MI5 approaches an agent, how is he or she to be convinced that their actions will not wind up in the pages of The New York Times? How will a Saudi Arabian intelligence official persuade a young Arab recruit that their information isn’t going straight to Langley, Virginia? These are not abstract hypotheticals, but urgent problems. Intelligence sharing is absolutely pivotal to modern counterterrorism.

Credit goes where credit is due, but not only does the Obama administration deserve what may be zero credit for this operation, they shot their mouths off for political gain. I thought the general idea – when it comes to “covert” operations – is we don’t get to hear about the successful stuff, and occasionally we hear about the disasters. Looking back at the last week of news, I’m comfortable with saying this simple statement.

I don’t need to know what happened in this situation.

Really, I don’t, and you need to ask yourself if you really needed to know about this operation either? There was no danger. Nobody was even close to an airplane with a bomb. The bomb was picked up and delivered to people on our side for inspection.

Did Obama get some political points? I don’t think so, but as we’ve seen, that won’t keep “un-named administration officials” from providing operational details to the press.

Levin is right, this should be vigorously investigated by Congress. Instead, Congress discusses really important stuff like steroids in Major League Baseball, and the Obama administration keeps bringing up gay marriage.

Oh joy…