1115.org

The Bush administration has responded to yesterday’s story, about an advance copy of an Osama bin Laden video being leaked to the media.

White House press secretary Dana Perino said the White House was not responsible for the leak and was “concerned about it.”

“When the White House refers information from an individual or a company, we refer that appropriately to the intelligence community. That’s what happened here,’” she said.

Fran Townsend, assistant to the president for counterterrorism and homeland security, told reporters that she would leave any investigation to the director of national intelligence “to ascertain what’s the appropriate way of dealing with this and understanding what happened, so we can ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Ross Feinstein, spokesman for National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, said his office had not yet opened an official investigation, but was looking into the matter.

Feinstein went from pants-on-fire-lying to blabbing-out-the-whole-truth in quite a hurry, didn’t he? Torture, of course, couldn’t have anything to do with it (since — say it with me — we don’t torture people). So why is he suddenly singing like a songbird? In any case, I really think his job requires him to make a halfway sincere effort to obfuscate such inconvenient truths. What’s with flatly stating that they haven’t yet opened an official investigation?

The tape/transcript was leaked a month ago. The White House doesn’t care about the leak. They’ve decided it wasn’t them, and so they’re not concerned about it. No, wait, I misread that didn’t I? They are concerned about it. But not to the point of actually doing anything. Or asking anyone else to. Even today, after it’s all become embarrassingly public, they’re not directing the Director of National Intelligence to do anything about it. They’re just leaving it up to him. To, you know, “ascertain what’s the appropriate way of dealing with this”. To decide whether there should be any investigation at all.

The Director of National Intelligence, of course, has not yet opened an official investigation. Because there was no need to till yesterday, you see. It hadn’t become a public embarrassment. Now that stuff has hit the fan, he is naturally looking into it.

Assuming that somebody eventually decides it might be a good idea to investigate a leak that has compromised intelligence collection about terrorist threats, it really shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out who’s responsible:

Katz said that on Sept. 7 she contacted White House counsel Fred Fielding, whom she had met before and trusted, and offered the video and a transcript, long before anyone else had a copy.
[…]
Katz said Fielding referred her to Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Bagnal asked her to pass the transcript and video on to Michael Leiter at the National Counterterrorism Center. Katz said she also copied Fielding in on the e-mail.

About an hour and a half after sending her e-mail, she saw news outlets reporting that the government had obtained the video. And soon after that, a transcript appeared on the ABC News Web site and later on the Fox News site.

There really weren’t too many people in the know, were they? And it leaked within 90 minutes. It really shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out who’s responsible. Of course, in this White House, that’s probably a sufficient reason for refusing to investigate.

‘Tis far, far better, is it not, not to investigate at all, than to investigate, indict, prosecute and pardon?