Is a D.O.D. Insider Leaking Classified Information to CNN?

On Wednesday, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr reported on multiple, highly sensitive documents that had been “provided” to CNN and which detail valuable, strategic intelligence gathered by the Department of Defense in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It should come as no surprise that Starr made sure to highlight all of the juicy details. She not only revealed U.S. knowledge of a covert meeting between Hamid Karzai’s brother and Mullah Baradar (a top Taliban leader who was later arrested in Pakistan), as well as a secret audio message played to Taliban commanders from reclusive Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, but she went on to inform the entire world that the United States has a safe house in Kabul (used by members of the Haqqani terror network) currently under surveillance. Great work Barbara!

Would anyone care to wager that within hours of Starr’s story being published on the Internet that the Haqqani network began sanitizing and abandoning all of its safe houses in Kabul?

How about a wager on whether or not Taliban operatives are now actively triangulating the information from Starr’s reporting in order to find out how the United States came by it? What about a wager on whether or not once the Taliban discover who’s responsible on their end, that person or persons will be murdered?

For such intrepid, show-our-cards-to-the-enemy-journalism, I have to say, “Brava, Ms. Starr!” Three cheers for you and your fellow travelers in the lamestream media. Once again you have aligned yourselves with disgruntled, America-hating, liberal intelligence insiders, who will do anything (even once again leaking classified intelligence because they don’t like how the game is being played) in order to take America “down a few pegs.”

I have a little piece of advice for Ms. Starr and other journalists like her: just because someone leaks, excuse me, “provides” classified information to your “news” organization, it doesn’t mean you should go public with it, especially if the information will endanger the lives of Americans, the lives of American intelligence assets, and will severely cripple ongoing intelligence operations.

But of course this isn’t just limited to Ms. Starr. The even bigger question raised by the article is who leaked the information to CNN in the first place?

According to confidential sources familiar with ongoing Department of Defense operations in the Af/Pak theater, there are several disgruntled players who are unhappy with how the D.O.D. has been gathering its intelligence and is providing force protection for our troops.

Reluctantly at the center of the fray, is a distinguished American warrior named Michael Furlong. Suffice it to say that Furlong has been unjustly turned into a modern-day whipping boy. Those with intimate knowledge of his operations not only resolutely stand behind him and his assertion that everything he has done is aboveboard and was conducted with the full support of his superiors, but that his efforts to secure for our troops the best force protection available has resulted in countless American lives being saved every single day.

So was it one of the aforementioned disgruntled players who leaked classified information to Barbara Starr and CNN? Word out of D.C. and Kabul is that suspicion is now falling upon someone within Furlong’s chain-of-command itself. The reason? The person in question is allegedly unhappy with how he believes in-theater intelligence is being gathered.

More to the point, the group Furlong brought in to provide atmospherics and force protection for our troops was too good, too fast. But rather than embrace the exceptional work the group was doing, petty jealousies ruled the day and, despite having done nothing wrong, Furlong was defenestrated. (Whether the Central Intelligence Agency was on the sidewalk yelling, “Jump,” or they were in the office helping give him a push, will all come out in due time.)

For the moment, the most troubling aspect for all Americans should be that someone above Furlong, someone within the D.O.D. (who should be committed to the safety of American troops above all else) appears to not only be taking shots at his own agency’s efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but to be using the most highly-sensitive information to do it.

Much more as this story develops.