Jonah: spot on. One of the cardinal rules of intelligence work is that it’s not so much what you know as what you can get the other guy to believe you know — or believe you don’t know, for that matter. Unless it’s a disinformation operation (which is always possible but, with this bunch of amateurs, unlikely), telling al-Qaeda that we’ve carted off all sorts of goodies from the most expensive shack in Pakistan — before we’ve even assessed or translated them — makes no sense. When you’re terminating a network with extreme prejudice, it’s best not to let the terminated know about it until it’s at least half past way too late.

Call it Abbottabad and Costello.