Men targeted for assassination in their countries may feel justified in reciprocating and assassinating Americans in our country.
Within days of SEAL Team Six’s killing of Osama on that midnight mission in Pakistan, Defense Secretary Bob Gates, reading all about the raid in the press, went to the White House to tell President Obama’s national security adviser pungently to “shut the (bleep) up.”
Leaked secrets of that raid may have led to the imprisonment for 33 years of a Pakistani doctor who helped us locate bin Laden.
Yet, according to Judicial Watch, the White House has been providing Hollywood with details of the raid for a movie that will, we may be sure, heroize our commander in chief. More troubling are two recent stories in The New York Times.
One, by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, describes how, at meetings in the Situation Room, Obama examines “baseball cards” of al-Qaida targets in Pakistan and Yemen and decides on the “kill list” for drone strikes.
Most explosive was the June 1 story by David Sanger, who wrote of the origins and operation of a secret U.S-Israeli cyberwar strike on Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. The Stuxnet virus we introduced into Natanz put 1,000 centrifuges out of action.
These security leaks raise moral, strategic and legal issues.
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