Did Obama’s Rush to Boast Bin Laden’s Killing Help Al Qaeda?

A compelling argument working its way around the Internet says that President Obama's late night rush to the television cameras that Sunday night threw away an enormous opportunity to do al Qaeda much greater damage. The unsigned message, purportedly by a retired Navy special operations officer, calls the ensuing open discussion of the mission by his administration a "massive security breach".

The text is overlong for re-printing here and better summarized. Its key argument is, what if there had been no announcement at all for an indefinite period? How would al Qaeda cells around the world know that anything had happened? Nothing emanated from that house in Abbottabad except by courier. There was no Internet connection, no e-mail, no landlines, no cellphones. Al Qaeda operatives would be left to wonder about the absence of messages from the boss but only after time passed. Even then, they would have nothing but speculation to go on. Secrecy would have sown confusion and disrupted their activity.

Would they soon tell the world too much?

"If and when they did learn something definitive there would be a mass flurry of communication and our electronic surveillance apparatus would get some great information and leads", says the anonymous writer.

Instead we compounded matters by blabbing about the "mother load" of intelligence material taken from the site, thus notifying al Qaeda members everywhere that the U.S. now knows everything that al Qaeda headquarters knew — their names, assignments and whereabouts. How many other al Qaeda lives might we have quickly terminated had bin Laden's killing been kept under wraps? Not to mention (as the writer does) that crowing about the captured trove told al Qaeda that we had probably learned about their "financing, communications, continuity of operation plans, organizational structures, strength, recruiting, training and standard operating procedures".

If we had not broadcast that we had captured that trove, how many al Qaeda terrorist plots might we have compromised by placing surveillance on the terrorists working up their plots?

We even blurted out to the al Qaeda underworld details of our operational methods as if there will be no further need for such missions. We told them to keep an eye out for strangers renting a house nearby. It maybe a safe house for observation. And then be ready to counter a force of 79 or so coming in on four helos. And they'd be fitted out with stealth technology.

But if we'd tried to keep bin Laden's extermination a secret, wouldn't the Pakistani military blow our cover? Not likely. Whether they did or did not know bin Laden was living next door, either way they would have said nothing publicly, bent on either hiding their complicity from the U.S. or their ineptitude at allowing an American raid not only to invade Pakistani airspace but the very town that was the home of their equivalent of West Point, surrounded by military retirees.

The writer shows evident hostility toward Obama, saying that the security breach was "only to enhance the poll numbers of a president". That it did, and the media immediately focused on the 9-point (temporary) "bump" in Obama's approval rating, as if that was what mattered. But the accusation is unfair when directed at the president. Revenge for our 3,000 dead on 9/11 was the reason for our lack of retraints, not politics. Obama had risked his presidency and won.

There is nothing new about our practice of revealing too much. (After all, the reason bin Laden used no electronic communication is that we just couldn't keep quiet about our brilliant electronic surveillance). More savvy intelligence operations elsewhere think us foolish for our impulsive lack of strategy.

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