Writing for the latest Commentary magazine, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey presents a disturbing assessment of the Obama administration’s efforts to protect sensitive intelligence.
[F]ollowing the killing of Osama bin Laden, revelations about the intelligence recovered in the raid on his Pakistan compound rendered much of that intelligence useless, because terrorists found out what we had learned. A few months after that, administration officials confirmed to the media that the United States had been involved along with Israel in implanting a computer virus in Iranian nuclear-enrichment centrifuges that caused physical damage, thereby justifying by our own professed standards any retaliation Iran might undertake. And, most recently, newspaper reports have disclosed planning for retaliatory operations against the terrorists who murdered our ambassador to Libya and military and other personnel present in our consulate in Benghazi.
The recklessness with which the Obama administration has allowed these precious and deadly secrets to be revealed in the light of day — and in all cases for political reasons, to buff the president’s image — s a little-covered national scandal. And it is on display throughout the text of Daniel Klaidman’s Kill Or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 304 pages). There are several details in this book that Klaidman, a veteran Newsweek correspondent, could only have uncovered from leaks of classified information at the highest levels.
Mukasey contends two of Klaidman’s “revelations have the potential to do real damage.” The first set of potentially harmful details involves evidence gathered at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison. The second involves sensitive foreign policy issues surrounding Yemeni prisoners and an al-Qaeda “deprogramming” regimen in Saudi Arabia.
