"A senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. '"Everything they were working on was closely held,' the official said."
Later, that same unnamed counterterrorism official is again cited, this time seeming to continue Brennan's narrative of the meeting before the raid, in which participants disagreed on the likely success of such a mission:
"That day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages 'ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent,' and added, 'This was a circumstantial case.'"
From the story's construction, one could reasonably conclude that the unnamed counterterrorism official is indeed still just Brennan. If not, who could it be? How many different white House counterterrorism officials would have debriefed the SEALs, if indeed that is even their role? How many would have been privy to that planning meeting? And how many different officials would have gotten authorization to sum up the events of that important day for this New Yorker writer? Also, it's an old journalistic trick to quote the same source, on and off the record -- thereby giving the source extra cover when discussing particularly delicate matters.
So, we don't know whether the article was based on anything more than Brennan, under marching orders to clean up the conflicting accounts he originally put out.
UNEXPLAINED DISPUTES
It's curious that the source chooses to emphasize the fundamental disagreement over whether the raid was a good idea. Presumably, there was a purpose in emphasizing this, but the New Yorker's "tick-tock," which is very light on analysis or context, doesn't tell us what it was. It may have been intended to show Obama as brave, inclined toward big risks (thereby running counter to his reputation) -- we can only guess.
This internal discord will get the attention of anyone who remembers all the assertions from intelligence officials over the years that bin Laden was almost certainly already dead -- either of natural causes or killed at some previous time.
Here's a bit more from The New Yorker on officials' doubts going into the raid:
"Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.'s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty percent. The center's director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad."
Those doubts are particularly interesting for several reasons: the CIA has had a long history of disputes between its covert action wing, which tends to advocate activity, and its analysis section, historically prone to caution. The action wing also has a history of publicizing its being right -- when it could purport to be right -- and covering up its failures. So when an insider chooses to make public these disagreements, we should be willing to consider motives.
This dispute can also be seen as an intriguing prologue to the rush to dump Bin Laden's body and not provide proof to the public that it was indeed bin Laden. What if it wasn't bin Laden that they killed? Would the government announce that after such a high-stakes operation? ("While we thought he'd be there, we accidentally killed someone else instead?" Seems unlikely.)
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Now, let us go to the next antechamber of this warren of shadowy entities and unstated agendas.
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