Rumsfeld: You Know, When You Discover An "Intelligence Jackpot," It's Probably Best Not To Tell People You've Discovered an Intelligence Jackpot

Kind of shows these guys up as the pikers, pretenders, and prats they are -- the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club.

And similarly, if you found some intelligence gems, you don't alert the enemy to this fact. You act.

"I thought to myself, why in the world would they be talking about that. It ought not be talked about, there ought to be..just go about their business, gather any intel you can, and leave in doubt the people out there who feel vulnerable as a result of this," he told 630 WMAL.

Nah, let's just tell the enemy what we have, so long as we can get a nice paragraph about us in the New York Times out of the deal.

As they say: If you get to the endzone, act like you been there before.

Instead of just drinking from the cup of captured intelligence, this Administration has to parade it around and show it off for their media friends.

Andrew C. McCarthy also wrote a few days ago that the mere death of bin Ladin should have not have been announced -- let the world figure it out in time, and in the meantime, prepare the next wave of attacks, without (for example) Zawahiri being given advanced warning.

Although that's a good general rule, I think it fails here. If Pakistan knew Osama lived there, they would know something had happened there immediately; even if they didn't know, we'd have to tell them in order to explain an attack on their sovereign territory, and then they'd leak it.

In this case, the target was so notorious that being quiet about it would have served no purpose at all. All it would have done would be to delay Obama's photo op, and that just would have happened in 24 or 48 hours anyway. In the meantime, Zawahiri would have a pretty damn good idea he was compromised.

But as to immediately proclaiming the value of the captured intelligence -- yes, this is an example of an administration that is big on preening and taking victory laps and not terribly concerned with actual success and results.

This administration talks when it should be quiet.

It's all this administration does -- talk and squawk and brag and boast and preen and praise itself.

Obama says he won't reveal the kill-pic because he doesn't want to "spike the football," i.e., he wants to act as if he's been there (the endzone) before.

But in fact he hasn't been there, and it shows, and his Administration is doing a "coordinated celebration" over their "intelligence jackpot."

posted by Ace at 06:50 PM

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