In an effort to justify last week’s orange alert, the United States apparently blew the cover of an Al-Qaida turncoat.
Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan had been captured, but was still allowed to email with his contacts. This allowed the authorities a rare peek inside the organization. That all came to a grinding halt when the United States publicized Khan’s arrest last Monday. With Khan’s cover blown, Britain and Pakistan were forced to prematurely arrest a dozen terrorists before they could be fully exploited as intelligence sources.
Britain and Pakistan are furious. We should be, too. The Administration blew Khan’s cover to advance a short-sighted political goal: they were, after all, desperate to show real progress against Al-Qaida.
We have a word for this, by the way: compromising state secrets for personal gain is called treason.