The Associated Press and National Security

All those interested in the questions raised by the seizure of telephone records from the Associated Press agency by the Department of Justice should read the article Walter Pincus proffered today in The Washington Post. The veteran journalist, who specialized in questions of national security, explains in limpid terms how the confidential information obtained by the AP forced the CIA to interrupt an operation as ingenious as it is important and how the press agency gave a questionable interpretation, even false, of the information it had obtained.

Pincus immediately established the unlawfulness of the leak which allowed the AP to report in May 2012 that a CIA operation in Yemen had foiled an al-Qaida plot aiming to blow up an American airliner. As the journalist explains, one of the main objectives of this operation wasn’t to foil a plot but to neutralize the operational head of al-Qaida for the Arabian Peninsula, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso.

Al-Quso was killed by a drone in 2012, just a day before the appearance of the AP article. The press agency agreed to a governmental request to delay the article’s publication.

Another aim of the operation was to neutralize the al-Qaida explosives expert in Yemen, the Saudi Ibrahim al-Asiri, who in particular hid the bomb in the underwear of the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in December 2009.

According to Pincus, the CIA put an end to the operation involving British and Saudi intelligence as soon as they got wind of the leak to the AP.

The article published by the AP on May 7 was far from complete. It did not mention that the CIA had obtained a bomb made by al-Asiri that should have been used in the attack against the American plane. It also missed the role of the Saudi secret agent who succeeded in infiltrating an al-Qaida cell in Yemen, the agent who volunteered to detonate the bomb al-Asiri was going to make.

In its article on the May 7, the AP presented this plot, instigated by the Saudi agent working together with the CIA, as a flagrant contradiction of a declaration from White House spokesperson Jay Carney. The said spokesperson had confirmed that the American government wasn’t aware of the al-Qaida plot against the U.S., which took place around the first anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden.

The head of the AP, Gary Pruitt, again accused Carney last Sunday of having deceived the American people on the question of the plot’s existence. In other words, Pruitt would have wanted Carney to publicly admit the role of the CIA and its allies in an operation which was still ongoing in Yemen!

According to Pincus, the Department of Justice didn’t have a choice: It was duty bound to investigate the leak to the AP. Had it gone too far by proceeding to a secret seizure of the telephone records of the agency? The journalist for The [Washington] Post maintains that the inquiry could have been delayed for years if the AP had been able to contest the seizure in front of a tribunal.

“There are no heroes here,” wrote Pincus showing himself to be particularly critical of the journalists, who cried for the First Amendment in this affair.