Ferrablog

It's now front page news on CNN.com:

The effort by U.S. officials to justify raising the terror alert level last week may have shut down an important source of information that has already led to a series of al Qaeda arrests, Pakistani intelligence sources have said.

Until U.S. officials leaked the arrest of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan to reporters, Pakistan had been using him in a sting operation to track down al Qaeda operatives around the world, the sources said.

This gaffe has been duly noted on the left side of the blogosphere, but pretty much ignored on the right (I wonder why?).

Mickey Kaus, in today's Kausfiles, who's supporting Kerry and the Democrats with his vote (and campaign contributions) but otherwise spends nearly 100% of time criticizing them, blamed Howard Dean and other Democratic critics who claimed politicization of the terror alerts for "cowing" the Bush administration into leaking Khan's identity:

But how many of those who will jump on Bush for any misguided revelation are the same people (e.g. Howard Dean, WaPo) who a week ago were the very ones pressuring him to reveal more about why he'd issued an "alert" about a three year old plot to blow up financial institutions--insinuating he was doing it for political reasons? ... Even shorter spin sum-up: How dare you be cowed by us!

This, of course, is silly, and I called him on it in an Email, in which I made the following observation:

But isn't the fact that they *were* cowed by the criticism the smoking gun showing that they do in fact put short-term political concerns ahead of the war on terror? I mean, if the WOT was the paramount consideration, why not take the political hit, which would probably blow over anyway in a news cycle or two? And presumably they wouldn't feel the need to leak Khan if their credibility on the alerts wasn't already in tatters. Maybe it's not just for the sake of our allies and the world that we need "rebranding"; perhaps we need "rebranding" at home as well w/r/t the terror alerts. After all, if Kerry is elected having not made the war on terror the raison d'etre for his presidency, won't these alerts be taken more seriously when he does issue them? It would be kind of a Nixon goes to China thing.

And I received this response:

Subj: Re: The Wrath of Khan
Date: 8/9/2004 1:48:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From:"Mickey Kaus" (mickey_kaus@msn.com)
To: Steve Ferra (email withheld)

good point!

"Rebranding" is Mickey's favorite theory for why Kerry should be elected: if Kerry is the international face of the US rather than Bush, we can get a lot more done in the rest of the world, even though Kerry will probably not deviate terribly from what Bush has done already. In any event, the larger point is made: The Khan leak is a blunder of major proportions, and it's purely the result of short-term political considerations on the part of the Bush administration.

And in the meantime, I'm sure we can all look forward to "National Preparedness Month" in September! Now they just need a theme for October.