Who Inside The Administration Leaked The New York Subway Story?

by Steve

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Let me see if I have this straight. The White House and the right wing blast the New York Times for damaging national security and our terror-fighting effort when the paper ran a story on a subject that Bush had been bragging about for years. It was claimed by the White House and the ankle-biting pundits that by revealing some details of a financial surveillance effort, Al Qaeda would be tipped off, even though Bush had been boasting about doing exactly this as far back as 2001.

Today, the New York Daily News reports that the FBI has disrupted a faulty plot by purportedly Al Qaeda operatives to blow up commuter train tunnels and flood Manhattan, and that federal officials say that the information which led to an arrest of a key operative months ago came from the monitoring of internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda suspects. Why is it bad for the Times to report on financial monitoring of overseas banking transactions that Bush has already bragged about, but now it’s OK for a federal official to reveal the information came from monitoring internet chat rooms?

Moreover, the key arrest was made by Lebanese police over two months ago (April 27th), and the Daily News reports that a “source” tells them that for the FBI this is still an ongoing investigation. GOP representative Peter King says that he has known about this investigation for months, but that he has kept quiet on it for obvious reasons. The FBI is reportedly unhappy with this story breaking today, because it compromises an ongoing investigation, but who had the knowledge of how the FBI got the leads on the chief suspect if the information didn’t come from inside the Bush Administration? Why were the details of an ongoing investigation revealed to the New York Daily News this week by a source apparently inside the government, requiring the FBI to roll up other suspects prematurely?

Agents were scrambling yesterday to try to nab other suspects, sources said.

Did someone inside the Bush Administration blow the cover off an active investigation, and reveal operational details less than two weeks after the same administration blasted the New York Times for reporting on a story that was already known? It wouldn't be the first time that this administration compromised an active investigation of potential terrorism for purely political purposes.