Jihadi-sniffers blame White House for leaking secrets

SITE makes its money from various playing clients, said to include both US and overseas government intelligence agencies. The US government refuses to comment on whether it already had the bin Laden video before it was supplied by SITE, but Katz said that Fielding made it clear to her that White House officials at least didn't possess a copy until she gave them one.

Rival backdoor-sniffing net intel pundit Ben Venzke, of IntelCenter, advised Katz to dry her eyes. He suggested that the leaks were an inevitable consequence of giving the video to White House people, rather than closemouthed spooks who might have kept it secret rather than passing the link to their entire address book.

"It is not just about getting the video first," Venzke told the Washington Post.

"It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place to make sure that the appropriate intelligence gets to where it needs to go in the intelligence community and elsewhere in order to support ongoing counterterrorism operations."

Katz would certainly seem to have forfeited most of her claim to being considered as a serious undercover researcher/spook-for-hire as soon as she approached White House officials directly. It doesn't look especially good, either - if you want to be seen as a discreet and reliable secret operator, betrayed in the media by headline-hungry, leaky politicoes - to then run off in a snit and give a comprehensive briefing to the Washington Post. Out-leaking the leakers, as it were; or perhaps debriefing the briefers.

And after all, we're scarcely talking about the hottest intel poop of the century here. It was a propaganda video, for god's sake. Osama's lads were about to release it publicly. Even to begin with, Katz comes across more as a journalist jumping the gun on an embargoed press release, not as a spy or secret agent.

Why, it's almost as if SITE were actually a media beastie rather than an intelligence one.

The Post writeup is here.®