The New and Improved Underwear Bomber

Sadly, few of us are celebrating last week’s coup pulled off by our spy agencies precisely because we have again narrowly avoided having to watch American carnage on TV. And this allows us to get back to watching American Idol.

But we should celebrate the fact that a fearless double agent, directed by both the CIA and the Saudi intelligence service, penetrated the inner core of the most fearsome cell of al Qaeda in Yemen and was able to be selected to carry out a suicide mission aimed at blowing an American commercial airliner out of the sky. Moreover, he was able to deliver “al Qaeda’s new and improved suicide underwear bomb” to his spy agency handlers, saved untold American lives and lived to tell about it…for now.

The bad news is that someone on the American side leaked information to The New York Times revealing to all those in the myriad al Qaeda affiliates far too much about the double agent and his methods.  Unfortunately, this has become an all-too-familiar pattern of those media elites, politicians and policy mavens of the Left who have evolved beyond the point of retaining their own instinct for survival.

It was their paper of record, The New York Times, that shortly after 9/11 broke the story of how the Bush Administration was monitoring cell phone traffic and monetary transactions of known terrorist collaborators. This newspaper has a decades-long abysmal record of compromising American intelligence agency methods, programs, and assets which in turn resulted in horrific torture, the loss of life of our collaborators and arguably the willful blindness that resulted in 9/11.

Sadly, our current President has participated in this tale of woe.

In his rush to tell the world of his courageous decision to kill bin Laden, he could not wait to make it known to the Islamicist underworld that we had captured a vast store of intelligence. Not only was the special forces command insulted by his craven attempt to take credit for their heroics, they have let it be known that he blew the opportunity to go after the al Qaeda cells identified in bin Laden’s data files. If the President had allowed them some time before he bragged to the world of his great assassination, how many other al Qaeda lieutenants and operatives might have been captured?

It was a classic case of a weak commander in chief attempting to take credit for a brilliant raid while blowing the chance for effective follow-up missions.

While it is still unclear as to who leaked the information that allowed us to know that it was a Saudi double agent who foiled the plot, what is clear is that the damage that this will cause to our future security /intelligence operations cannot be blamed on President Bush or on someone in the Romney inner circle. It seems likely that we will learn more about the Saudi double agent and who outed him.

But one thing is clear, we need a new commander in chief who understands that his electoral prospects must by subordinated to the greater issue of national security, to the safety of the homeland. Candidate Obama told us that he would repair the damage that his predecessor, the unilateralist president, had done to our reputation throughout the world.

During his final six months in office, he might focus his attention on how to prevent those foreign nationals who collaborate with our intelligence services, those who put their lives on the line to prevent Americans from being killed. And certainly he should certainly see to that this man who prevented the new improved underwear bomb from blowing up a plane over one of our cities, be offered a entry into our most advanced witness protection program.