The President and Bin Laden's Satellite Phone

To justify his anger at the New York Times, President Bush at his press conference today told the story of the 1998 leak of intelligence from bin Laden's satellite phone. The president was right to point to that leak as an example of where irresponsible journalism can help terrorists, but the analogy to last week's NYT piece about the secret NSA program is wrong and the attempt to make it is worse.

In August 1998 President Clinton received unimpeachable evidence that bin Laden was personally behind the twin bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. It came from US and British monitoring of his satellite phone and of a fax number used by al Qaeda in France. Relying on that evidence, Clinton ordered the cruise missile attacks on four sites in Afghanistan and Sudan. Shortly after the Embassy bombings the fact that bin Laden used a satellite phone for operational purposes, and even its number, appeared in the press. Thereafter he stopped using it and as one senior counterterrorism officer later told me, this was "a big deal."

It is hard to see how last week's revelation that the US government is aggressively monitoring email and long distance telephone calls could or would alter the terrorists' approach to communications. They must already assume all of their digital and analog communications are vulnerable. The only thing undermined by the revelation and the subsequent rebuttal is what is left of the president's credibility.