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It’s not just Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The head of the National Counterterrorism Center also took a measured response to this week’s ongoing disgorgement of U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks, saying that a much-predicted halt in intelligence agencies’ sharing has yet to manifest itself.
After giving a speech to a Washington think tank on Tuesday about the mutating terrorist threat, Michael Leiter, the director of the U.S.’s central counterterrorism hub, told reporters it was “too early to tell” whether intelligence analysts were ceasing to share information with each other out of concern that classified material will end up in the hands of the radical transparency group. In October, Leiter’s boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, said that earlier document dumps from WikiLeaks were “big yellow flags” for intelligence agents, and predicted a “chilling effect” on analysts’ cooperation.
Leiter said that Clapper was right to sound the alarm, but so far, analysts weren’t clamming up. The counterterrorism community is in “a relatively healthy place on information sharing,” Leiter said, since it’s had to work since 9/11 to strike a greater balance between passing data on between different agencies’ analysts and safeguarding top-secret material. Non-intelligence agencies of the government haven’t had the pressure of high-profile commissions or congressional hearings asking them why they had kept this-or-that critical memo bottled up within a particular office.
But the National Counterterrorism Center is also more of a one-way system than some other agencies. Its analytic side consists of about 300 intelligence analysts from across the various spy services, each of whom pass along terrorism-related information for synthesis at the center. But they “don’t send all of it back out” to the component agencies, Leiter clarified, citing the “risks” of having critical counterterrorism information leak out.
Still, Leiter didn’t match Gates’ annoyed-but-unfazed tone on WikiLeaks yesterday. He associated himself with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who blasted WikiLeaks on Monday for waging what she called “an attack on the international community.” Leiter said WikiLeaks made it harder to have “candid conversations” with foreign counterterrorism allies, and worried about the disclosures potentially “endanger[ing] lives.”
So far, the anticipated intelligence freeze remains hypothetical. But Leiter said he and other senior officials would “certainly reevaluate where information is going.”
Photo: Kentucky Department of Homeland Security
See Also:
- Pentagon Boss Is Not Sweating WikiLeaks
- WikiLeaks Reveals Iran’s Secret, Worldwide Arms Hunt
- Are Pakistan’s Top Spooks Finally Playing Ball?
- Spies Protest After Intel-Sharing Tools Shut Down
- Pakistan Partners With U.S. on Killer Drone Strikes
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