Juan Cole: The Pakistan Connection - (How GOP Ruins Terror Investigations)

So here's the upshot of the whole London airline bomb story...

The Republicans ran right to the press with it, like they did in 2004 -- and who knows if a planner tipped off by GOP fundraising demagoguery will accomplish his mission next year, like the London subway bombers did in 2005.

This should be front page news.


http://www.juancole.com/2006/08/pakistan-connection-pakistani-police.html

British authorities say that they have been investigating the group behind the airplane bombing plot for "about a year." The Scotsman says that the investigation began in 2005.

US authorities were only told about some details two weeks ago, apparently. It may be that the British counter-terrorism community learned its lesson from the loose lips of the Bushies in summer of 2004. I argued then that from what we could tell from open sources, it seemed likely that the Bush administration played politics with information about a double agent in Pakistan who was helping monitor a London al-Qaeda cell. It seems likely that the election-year leak allowed budding terrorists like Mohammad Sadique Khan to escape closer scrutiny, and so permitted the 7/7/05 London subway bombings to go forward.

This time, the MI5 and MI6 and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) may not have told Washington everything.

Once again, Juan Cole is the smartest guy in the room on the Middle East. Whichever Dem becomes President in 2008 ought to hire him immediately!

:kick:

:wow:

k&r

Juan Cole would make an excellent Secretary of State or head of Homeland Security.

In this post, he details how the UK used police and counterterror work to investigate and stop the plot.

Moreover, the UK authorities no longer trust the Bush White House because the Bushies leak for political ends.

And that puts us ALL at risk.