The recent video from Osama bin Laden was leaked to the press before al Qaeda officially released it. This alerted the terrorist organization to a breach in its security, and apparently it has fixed the problem. Whether that was done by killing someone, changing an encryption key or something else is hard to guess, but we have now lost an intelligence conduit into the organization we have spent a trillion dollars fighting.

This seems like a huge failure to me, yet the report was picked up by only a few newspapers and has not triggered much discussion. The leak seems to have come from the White House, so add it to the growing list of major security breaches for which no one has been held accountable:

1. Iranian encryption -- Ahmed Chalabi told Iran we had broken their code and were successfully intercepting their communiques. A White House darling once groomed to lead the new Iraq, Chalabi learned this from "a drunk American" who has never been identified.
2. Middle Eastern oil and energy data -- Though the CIA has never issued a report, the New Yorker reported shortly after Valerie Plame's cover was blown that the firm she worked for acquired commercial data from ARAMCO and other Arab companies on oil reserves, nuclear fuel purchases and other critical energy transactions.
3. Iraqi weapons -- Since government and private intelligence analysts unanimously agreed Iraq's arsenal was over 95% depleted and likely inoperative, Rumsfeld and Cheney created the Office of Special Plans to circumvent the intelligence hierarchy and feed bogus information into official channels, thus inventing a threat were none existed. Chalabi was a major source of lies.
4. Physical security -- A fake reporter was granted access not just to White House press conferences, but to the building, which he visited routinely for a year before being discovered. Who let him in has never been revealed.

There is an interesting twist to this latest White House failure. It was not the U.S. government that had cultivated the al Qaeda conduit, but SITE Intelligence Group, a private firm. Perhaps they will file a lawsuit over loss of a business asset, rendering the negligence of Congress and the press in the face of repeated White House intelligence breaches moot. That would seem a fitting end to an administration whose primary policy objective has always been funneling public money to private crony firms.