Was word of thwarted al Qaeda bomb plot leaked too soon?

(CBS News) The Saudi double agent who infiltrated Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ruined a plot last week to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner had provided information for two years, and it was shared with the CIA.

The Saudi/CIA operation took a sudden turn when AQAP asked for a volunteer to smuggle a bomb onto an American jetliner.

It was decided that the source would volunteer to be the suicide bomber.

Instead, he delivered the newly-designed bomb to his U.S. and Saudi handlers.

The source was debriefed for days. Information he gave was used to launch a drone strike in Yemen that took out Fahd al-Quso, a key commander for AQAP.

But when the story of the unraveling of the airline plot leaked to the press, it also likely reached AQAP's master bomb-maker, Ibrihim al Asiri.

"The question is - was this operation leaked to the press too early for us to find the bomb maker and, if he's still around in a year, that's going to be a critical question everybody is going to ask about," notes former CIA analyst Phil Mudd.

Asiri is still at large and believed to be training others to build bombs using his designs.

"You've got another wave of bomb makers we need to be worrying about," says Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute. "So, from my perspective, he's at the top of the list for kill-capture priorities."

Now, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and members of Congress are calling for an across-the-board review of how this information got out.

Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Diane Feinstein (D, Calif.) says, "I don't think those leaks should have happened. There was an operation in progress, and I think the leak is regarded as very serious."

The question remains -- what happens to the source, who's credited with foiling this operation, the 2010 plot to take down cargo planes bound for Chicago with printer bombs, and possible attacks at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen.

Says Mudd, "How do we get not only him, but his family, out into a situation where they're first guarded from any scrutiny, that is, for example, new documents, new life, new names, but second, in a geography, whether it's the United States, Europe or elsewhere, where they're not under constant threat."

AQAP is scrambling to figure out what the source knew, what places he saw, and what accesses he had, because those are all things that give them vulnerability.

To see John Miller's report, click on the video in the player above.

[QuarkHadron]

As with all of these 'high level' leaks, we can be pretty sure it was a politician. Which makes one see, once again, that we have different laws for our new nobility - the politicians of the two-party system - and us commoners. We see, once again, that our classification laws are ignored and abused by our political 'elite.'

According to our laws, information can be classified as secret 'when its release would cause serious damage to national security.' Yet, classified information is 'leaked' frequently when it provides some political advantage, but there is never any prosecution for breaking the law.

Then we have the abuse of the system to keep politically damaging information from the American public (voters). We find out that the government has been 'secretly' releasing Taliban prisoners for years. That it was being done was classified 'secret.' Now, I'm not talking about the release of the

Taliban. I can see where the act of releasing them could cause serious damage to national security - and get more of our troops killed.

I'm talking about keeping the fact it is being done secret. I can fully understand how setting these leaders of soldiers intent on killing us 'would cause serious damage to national security. If the administration doesn't feel the act hurts national security, then how does admitting it to the American public fit that definition?

Obviously it doesn't. It might 'cause harm' to political careers of those making the decision, but not our national security.

Doesn't anyone else feel that the politicians are abusing their authority by keeping these kinds of things from us? I'm not sure what scares me most - that my government is sneaking around and keeping secrets from me that obviously should not be classified - or that the American people are so docile they don't see it as a problem.

We have returned to the serfdom our forefathers died to free us from. We took their sacrifice, freeing us from rule by nobility, and created a new nobility. The saddest part is that we participate in sustaining this atrocity by electing the same career politicians over and over and over, going to the polls to cast our vote as if it was a high school popularity contest. "People get the government they deserve.' We are a bunch of lazy, naive, sheep who can't be bothered to shoulder the responsibility for our own government.

[chuckterzella]

This is of course more of a problem with Congress than with the press. While I don't know which Congressman, Senator or staffer (and this obviously includes the White House and Pentagon as well) leaked the information,the fault lies with them, not the news agencies.

It is exactly because we live in an age of instantaneous news availability that A)someone in 'authority' feels they want to make points in the 'Show what I know' game and B)news agencies are aware that if someone in their newsroom found it out then most likely someone in EVERY newsroom also knows, so they have to scoop the competition- there's no time anymore to for an editor to sit back and thoughtfully wonder, "Am I damaging my country and helping our enemies by publishing this?"

In WWII, so many intelligence secrets were kept from the press- the British breaking of Germany's 'Enigma' code, Patton's false "1st Army" invasion group for instance- and these secrets helped the Allies win the war. Even though the famous war correspondant Ernie Pyle actually got onto and saw the carnage on Omaha Beach on D-Day,he readily obeyed Omar Bradley's order to not report it.

To paraphrase John Sanford, 'The public is entitled to know, but not neccesarily right now.'. In cases such as this, that should be the axiom for both the press and the government to follow. After all, did any member of the public benefit from knowing about what was admittedly a major intelligence coup? Of course not, interesting though it was.

We must learn to balance the people's right to know with knowing what's right to tell the people, and when. Atrocities in a war zone? Tell em now. Getting our hands on the latest enemy IED and intell? Only after that intell was able to be exploited to it's fullest (and since that information included the fact that we were able to infiltrate AQAP)maybe never.

While I firmly believe in a transparent government, I see no reason why some guy in suburbia should be privy to our intelligence information, unless his cul-de-sac is the next target.