Bin Laden's Last September Message: Secrets, Lies, and Videotapes

Dave Lucas posted this interesting entry about the latest Bin laden video aired on the occasion of September 11th.

According to the source article, a small private intelligence company that monitors Islamist terrorist groups was able to obtain the Bin Laden video on september 7th, before its official release by Al-Qaeda. The company "notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition." It sent a link to the video that was on a private page on its website to "two senior officials on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release."
"Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide."

It is evident from this story that the Bush administration favors the political use of Al-Qaida videos, over other considerations, mainly security, since the company and the intelligence community judged the early diffusion of the video as alerting Al-Qaida to the anomaly and maybe cutting an important link to Al-Qaida. The white house rushed to reassure the intelligence community that the move does not affect its intelligence operations against Al-qaida.

My question however is how a small security company headed by a 44 year old "Iraqi-born Israeli citizen whose father was executed by Saddam Hussein in the 1960s", and who "has made the investigation of terrorist groups a passionate quest"...since only 2002, can actually have access to this kind of material and by which means ? Her competitors are asking the same question.

All this private security business and premonitions about terrorists are making me ask questions. And of course the citizenship of the company's director, her connection to Iraq where both terror and security businesses are thriving, and her sudden passion for tracking terrorist groups in 2002, and only the Islamist ones, are none of my business and yours.

You can see the lady's picture here.

Read here on who is thought to be behind the latest Bin Laden Video.