Al Qaeda: Our Source Was The New York Times

Bill Roggio <a title=”Winds of Change.NET: High New York Times: Prisoner Transports Revealed” href=”http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006924.php”>asks a very good question:

If you are al Qaeda, and you are interested in interdicting or attacking CIA air services that transport captured high value targets, how would you go about finding out how the CIA is moving these prisoners around? Would you:

a) Attempt to penetrate the CIA and dig into the inner workings of these operations.
b) Invest heavily in paying off workers at local airports and in charter airlines across the Middle East and Asia to provide intelligence on suspicious flight activities.
c) Read the New York Times.

And yes, not surprisingly, “C” is the correct answer. Perhaps the Times is jealous of Newsweek’s success in the sedition department, and is looking to up the ante a notch or two.

Or maybe they’re just nostalgic for the halcyon days of Vietnam.

Update: Just staggering. I missed the one over the holiday weekend, but Duane Patterson, Hugh Hewitt’s Generalissimo, links to an astonishingly cynical and dismissive piece in–you guessed it–the New York Times titled, “Ground Zero Is So Over” by Frank Rich:

But there is another, national narrative here, too. Bothered as New Yorkers may be by what Charles Schumer has termed the “culture of inertia” surrounding ground zero, that stagnation may accurately reflect most of America’s view about the war on terror that began with the slaughter of more than 2,700 at the World Trade Center almost four years ago. Though the vacant site is a poor memorial for those who died there, it’s an all too apt symbol for a war on which the country is turning its back.

In January of 2004, Andrew Sullivan wrote that “For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn’t really happen”. Now Rich seems to believe that the War on Terror is also a mirage–or, like the pit that awaits a new WTC, some sort of holding pattern largely ignored by the rest of the country (even here in blue state California, that would be news to the many motorists I see every day with “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbons on their cars).

Not surprisingly Duane has numerous examples that prove Rich is deeply in error in his assumptions.