BY NCVIKING

Diane Feinstein (D), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, gives up that we had a secret partnership with Pakistan using bases inside that country to fly Predator Drone missions. Her blab was a shock because until now it had been a closely guarded secret. Most intelligence experts believed that these operations had originated from bases in Afghanistan.

“If accurate, what this says is that Pakistani involvement, or at least acquiescence, has been much more extensive than has previously been known,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “It puts the Pakistani government in a far more difficult position [in terms of] its credibility with its own people. Unfortunately it also has the potential to threaten Pakistani-American relations.” – Chicago Tribune

Hot Air points out that this gaffe may have put the entire program in jeopardy.

This exposure will cause much greater damage. The Pakistani public will almost certainly demand an end to these Predator flights, which have been highly successful at decimating terrorist leadership in inaccessible areas of the Pakistani frontier. Without that kind of tactic available, we will have to fall back to more intrusive and potentially less effective overflights from Afghanistan. This could allow our enemies breathing room to rebuild their networks in the region, and put us on a collision course with Islamabad on our efforts to fight them. At the very least, Feinstein has just complicated the diplomatic situation for Barack Obama by an order of magnitude.

Open mouth, insert foot.

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