as we may blog

CNN tells us:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (CNN) — 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.

In background briefings with journalists last week, unnamed U.S. government officials said it was the capture of Khan that provided the information that led Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to announce a higher terror alert level.

The question is, again, a straightforward one. Why would U.S. officials take care to name a captured al Qaeda suspect for the American public when 1) the suspect provided "no specific information that says an attack is imminent," and 2) his public naming compromised a larger, broader sting on al Qaeda suspects?

It’s the blog series that just won’t end! It appears yesterday’s decision to put some of our nation’s most treasured financial institutions at ORANGE!!! was the result of some, shall we say, agéd intelligence. The lede of the liberal Washington Post‘s "Pre-9/11 Acts Led To Alerts":

Most of the al Qaeda surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and authorities are not sure whether the casing of the buildings has continued, numerous intelligence and law enforcement officials said yesterday.

More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older.

Billmon, as always, offers an excellent analysis of how this most recent terror scare protects Americans from post-convention bounces.

A DC Metro police officer outside of the Farragut West Metro stop realizes he’s been issued babe-detector glasses instead of Arab-detector glasses.

…the story about the right-on-cue capture of a high value al-Qaeda target is gone. You can still click the link in the entry below to get to it, but there’s no mention of this story on the front pages of cnn.com or msnbc.com.

How strange.

Hopped over to cnn.com after the Kerry speech to scan the headlines. Though Kerry’s speech is the top headline (at least for this hour), sure enough, there’s the headline just under the "MORE NEWS" heading:

• Key al Qaeda suspect seized | Profile

For those with short memories, I’d like to point you back to "July Surprise," a piece in The New Republic published July 19. From that piece:

But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”–the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Though a day late, it appears they weren’t a dollar short. Tonight from CNN:

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, has been captured in Pakistan, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said Thursday.

I’m not going to hold my breath for CNN to put two and two together.

UPDATE, 10:50 pm. Now 150% more damning.

More cogent here. From the LA Times:

Another U.S. counterterrorism official said Ghailani’s capture would have been even more significant if not publicized so quickly.

“He’s been on the run since 1998 so you have five years of critical intelligence that can be mined: where he has been, who he has been with, how his operations worked,” said the counterterrorism official.

“Now, anything that he was involved in is being shredded, burned and, thrown in a river. Those things are all going away as we speak,” the official added. “We have to assume anyone affiliated with this guy is on the run . . . when usually, we can get great stuff as long as we can keep it quiet.”

Several U.S. officials said it was unclear why Pakistan publicized the arrest….

The usual suspects gathered around the back table at Joe’s Place last night to watch the Cubs and to bid Ben adieu as he heads off to grad school. As is typical of these gatherings, a heated political argument broke out of the PBR haze, engulfing all within a ten foot radius of the epicenter. The lines of argument were, as always, clear as mud: the discussion started at Fahrenheit 9/11, briefly visited the Nazis (at which point the Blogbot editorial staff glazed over), and ended much later on assault weapons. The scorecard?

Arguments won: 0
Minds changed: 0

It’s remarkable that we’ve submitted ourselves willingly to this for the last five years or so. A more productive activity might be to get together on Friday nights and try to push down Schaeffer Hall. There was one notable question posed in the argument last night, though, which is the point of this rambling introductory anecdote. "Who are the undecided voters?" I don’t think a single one of us could think of any.

National Annenberg Election Survey to the rescue this morning! [ PDF ] Not only does this survey give a better idea of who is still undecided or "persuadable," it has several positive indicators for John Kerry’s campaign. Kerry implications aside, here’s what Annenberg finds about those who still haven’t made up their minds:

The most important difference between the persuadable voters (about 18 percent of all registered voters, compared to 20 percent in June) and those who had firmly made up their minds came on the question of paying attention to the presidential campaign. Seventeen percent of the persuadable respondents, and 35 percent of everyone else, said they were following it very closely. Persuadable voters also were also younger, more moderate and less conservative, and had slightly lower household incomes than those who had made up their minds.

So our undecided voters are, not surprisingly, not paying close attention right now, younger, and poorer. I think I know this demographic. When asked specific questions about the direction of this country, the undecided/persuadables are wary of the incumbent—even if they aren’t quite sure what to make of the challenger—not at all an unusual election year phenomenon.

Though the pure Bush-Kerry horse race numbers indicate a virtual dead heat, surveys like Annenberg’s are indicators that the race may not be as close as it initially appears. Undecided and persuadable voters increasingly find the president to be "out of touch with people like me."