WHAT HEELS: Media Endangers Life Of Man Who May/May Not Be CIA Analyst Who Tracked Down Bin Laden
The Associated Press published a profile of “John,” a CIA analyst who “was the first to put in writing last summer that the CIA might have a legitimate lead on finding Usama bin Laden,” assembled through interviews with former and current U.S. intelligence officials, nearly all of whom insisted on anonymity because “they were not authorized to speak to reporters or because they did not want their names linked to the bin Laden operation.”
According to AP, “John” was “[h]idden from view, standing just outside the frame of that now-famous photograph” of President Barack Hussein Obama and his Cabinet sitting in the White House Situation Room watching the raid on bin Laden’s compound go down.
That piqued the idle curiosity of a Wikileaks-type group called Cryptome, which combed through the photos on the White House Twitter feed until they found one photographed from a different angle that clearly showed the man’s face. When that same man accompanied then-CIA director Leon Panetta to a Senate intelligence committee briefing about the mission, a couple of days later, they were fairly certain it was “John.” That was good enough for gossip site Gawker, which published the photos, with a big fat red arrow pointing to the man Cryptome thinks is “John” along with a weak disclaimer that the man “could be a random staffer who happened to be in both locations with John.” [Editorial Note: The Stiletto read the Gawker article, but will not link to it for obvious reasons.]
As Mediaite notes, “[o]ther than pure human curiosity, no benefit arises from knowing who this man is, if it even is him”:
If the person in the photo isn’t “John the CIA agent,” then an entire new set of complications arise. Not to mention the title of the post: “Is This The Guy Who Killed Bin Laden?” The assumption from the headline is that this man was responsible for physically taking the Bin Laden’s life, though the text of the article clearly states that is not the case. …
Putting a face to the man who was instrumental in bringing down the idol of hundreds of potentially suicidal psychopaths bent on killing as many Americans as possible only serves to give Al-Qaeda members a target to shoot at. …
[A]s one Gawker commenter so succinctly put it: “If this is the guy who tracked down Bin Laden, I can think of no better way to thank him for his outstanding civil service than by outing him on a highly trafficked web site and putting his career, his life, the lives of his loved ones in danger.”
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