It Was All a Clever Ruse
This Slate article led me to update Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan’s Wikipedia entry. The important bits:
As of right now, Google News shows no other stories containing both the terms “Khan” and “George Friedman", so this is totally unconfirmed. Another search for “George Friedman” and his company Stratfor, shows that he gets quoted a lot on intelligence matters, but he doesn’t seem to be a consistently pro- or anti-Bush shill. So I take it with a grain of salt, but the source is more credible than, say, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.However, two days later, another Reuters article allowed that maybe the leak wasn’t the tremendous screw-up the wire service had previously reported. “Terrorism experts,” the piece noted, “said the reasons for the release of Khan’s name could range from a judgment error to a sophisticated ploy designed to put al Qaeda on edge about the extent to which the network has been infiltrated by moles.”
George Friedman, chairman of Stratfor, a private global intelligence company, learned that it was the latter. “There was a decision in the U.S. intelligence community to roll up the al-Qaida networks we know about now and push them out of a pre-election attack,” he told me.That is to say, the most important information that came from Khan was not about the five potential financial-sector targets in New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., that al-Qaida had chosen as far back as four years ago to attack. What U.S. intelligence learned is that there was an extremely serious, imminent operation in the advanced-planning stages. The information placed in the Times, Friedman explains, “was part of a systematic series of leaks, designed to confuse al-Qaida. They don’t know what we know and what we don’t know. Since their operational principle is never attack into a highly secure environment, the assumption is that they’d abort this operation.”