Guy Taylor and Dan Boylan at
the Washington Times offers a piece on the Obama administration’s manipulation of classified information for political gain.
They wanted him dead.
For years, a clandestine U.S.
intelligence team had tracked a man they knew was high in the leadership of al
Qaeda — an operative some believed had a hand in plotting the gruesome 2009
suicide attack in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers.
Their pursuit was personal,
and by early 2014, according to a source directly involved in the operation,
the agency had the target under tight drone surveillance. “We literally had a
bead on this guy’s head and just needed authorization from Washington to pull the
trigger,” said the source.
Then something unexpected
happened. While agents waited for the green light, the al Qaeda operative’s
name, as well as information about the CIA’s classified surveillance and plan
to kill him in Pakistan, suddenly appeared in the U.S. press.
Abdullah al-Shami, it turned
out, was an American citizen, and President Obama and his national security
advisers were torn over whether the benefits of killing him would outweigh the
political and civil liberties backlash that was sure to follow.
In interviews with several
current and former officials, the al-Shami case was cited as an example of what
critics say was the Obama White House’s troublesome tendency to mishandle some
of the nation’s most delicate intelligence — especially regarding the Middle
East — by leaking classified information in an attempt to sway public opinion
on sensitive matters.
By the end of Mr. Obama’s
second term, according to sources who spoke anonymously with The Washington
Times, the practices of leaking, ignoring and twisting intelligence for
political gain were ingrained in how the administration conducted national
security policy.
Those criticisms have
resurfaced in the debate over whether overall intelligence fumbling by the
Obama White House in its final months may have amplified the damage wrought by
suspected Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election last year.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
No comments:
Post a Comment