White House Denies Mishandling Al-qaida Tip-off

The Bush administration today was accused of compromising surveillance of al-Qaida by leaking a video of Osama bin Laden 20 minutes after it received a copy from a small private intelligence firm.

The leak alerted al-Qaida to the firm's surveillance of a channel it had been using to pass along messages and advance warning of attacks, Site, or the Search for International Terrorist Entities, said.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," Rita Katz, the firm's founder, told the Washington Post today.

Ms Katz said her firm had contacted two White House officials on September 7 after obtaining a copy of the first video of Bin Laden to surface in three years.

The officials, White House counsel Fred Fielding, and a adviser on homeland security, Joel Bagnal, made it clear they did not have a copy of the video at the time, Ms Katz told the paper.

She sent an email link to the private web page containing the video and a transcript to Mr Fielding and a senior official at the national counter-terrorism center, Michael Leiter, asking them to keep the video's existence a secret until its official release by al-Qaida.

Minutes later, however, intelligence agencies began downloading the video from Site's website, and within hours the existence of the video was being reported on cable news networks.

In the last five years, Site has established a reputation of tracking extremist groups, making its research available to a paying clientele.

The White House denied that Mr Fielding or Mr Bangal were the source of the leak.

"To the extent that we have Americans coming forward to provide us information, whether it be a private citizen or a private cooperation, or anybody in America that can provide the government information, we take it very seriously that they should, one, feel comfortable that in providing that information, that their sources will be protected; and that we will act on it, if necessary," the press secretary, Dana Perino, told reporters today.

"This was a cause of concern that the information was leaked."