Wednesday, August 18, 2004
Leak
Who leaded Al Qaeda double agent Khan's name to the press? Juan Cole tries to get to the bottom of the mystery.
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In the week of July 26, the week of the Democratic National Convention, the Bush administration made a decision to announce a heightened security alert for those buildings in Washington, DC and New York City. Tom Ridge made the announcement on Sunday, Aug. 1, and there was then a background briefing for reporters.
The Ridge announcement raised the question of where the information on the surveillance of the buildings had come from. Late Sunday afternoon, August 1, the entire national press corps worked the phones furiously, checking with government officials about where Ridge had gotten his tip. The Boston Globe managed to get through to a CIA analyst, who knew the story of Khan's arrest but refused to give out the specific name.
Earlier on, Reuters had reported, and I had repeated, that the name of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan was given on background to the press by a Bush administration official. The assertion was confirmed by National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice in an August 8 interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, in which she said that US officials gave the name out on background. Both Reuters and Rice appear to have been wrong in this allegation, and I regret having repeated it. The transcript of the briefing, when released, did not contain Khan's name. However, I am not very embarrassed about being wrong, since Rice misled me. Her office later issued a correction, saying that she had just repeated back to Blitzer his own statement, and had misspoken. This performance by her seems to me bizarre and alarming, but there you have it.
