Really? wrote:John D wrote:
That can't be the original story because it has a time of 7:45pm yesterday. The original WaPo article hit yesterday afternoon cause I watched the aspie WaPo reporter on Newshour at 6:00pm.
And yes.... all other media sources are simply quoting from the original WaPo article.
The timestamps on online news posts are irrelevant because they change every time the author(s) change the piece. Here's an archive of the article stamped 5:01.
http://archive.is/25QQx
This is the most important part:
Trump went on to discuss aspects of the threat that the United States only learned through the espionage capabilities of a key partner. He did not reveal the specific intelligence gathering method, but described how the Islamic State was pursuing elements of a specific plot and how much harm such an attack could cause under varying circumstances. Most alarmingly, officials said, Trump revealed the city in the Islamic State’s territory where the U.S. intelligence partner detected the threat.
The Washington Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.
“Everyone knows this stream is very sensitive and the idea of sharing it at this level of granularity with the Russians is troubling,” said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who also worked closely with members of the Trump national security team. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject.
The identification of the location was seen as particularly problematic, officials said, because Russia could use that detail to help identify the U.S. ally or intelligence capability involved. Officials said that the capability could be useful for other purposes, possibly providing intelligence on Russia’s presence in Syria. Moscow and would be keenly interested in identifying that source and possibly disrupting it.
Russia and the United States both regard the Islamic State as an enemy and share limited information about terrorist threats. But the two nations have competing agendas in Syria, where Moscow has deployed military assets and personnel to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Russia could identify our sources or techniques,” the senior U.S. official said. A former intelligence official who handled high-level intelligence on Russia said that given the clues Trump provided, “I don’t think that it would be that hard [for Russian spy services] to figure this out.”
At a more fundamental level, the information wasn’t the United States’ to provide to others. Under the rules of espionage, governments — and even individual agencies — are given significant control over whether and how the information they gather is disseminated even after it has been shared. Violating that practice undercuts trust considered essential to sharing secrets.
The officials declined to identify the ally, but said it is one that has previously voiced frustration with Washington’s inability to safeguard sensitive information related to Iraq and Syria.
“If that partner learned we’d given this to Russia without their knowledge or asking first that is a blow to that relationship,” the U.S. official said.
McMaster hasn't denied that Trump revealed the name of the city where the intel was gathered, he's actually confirmed it in the video I've posted at that top of the page. He's just not convinced that the reveal was inappropriate and thinks it fits within the pattern of sharing information with other countries about common threats.
I guess that without knowing the name of the city or which US ally gave the US this piece of intel it's hard to know for sure. I've read speculations which, if true, would definitely be cause for concern.