Pakistan: CIA bomber was an al Qaeda blogger?

Geez. This just keeps going from bad to worse.

From NBC:

Al-Balawi was arrested by Jordanian intelligence more than a year ago. He had moderated the main al-Qaida chat forum before his arrest and was known online as Abu Dujanah al-Khurasani.

“Abu Dujanah was an active member of jihadi forums,” said Evan Kohlmann, who tracks jihadi Web sites for NBC News. “He was actually an administrator on the now-defunct Al-Hesbah forum, previously al-Qaida's main chat forum.”

The Jordanians believed that al-Balawi had been successfully reformed and brought over to the American and Jordanian side. They set him up as an agent and sent him to Afghanistan and Pakistan to infiltrate al-Qaida.

His mission? To find and meet Ayman al Zawahiri.

And his Jordanian handler (also killed in the blast) was a distant relative of the Jordanian royal family.

<--- The body of Jordanian intelligence agent is returned from Pakistan to Jordan.

The remains of a Jordanian distantly related to the royal family who was killed in an attack in Afghanistan were repatriated on Saturday and received by King Abdullah II, Queen Rania and other royals.

Captain Ali bin Zeid was killed "on Wednesday evening as a martyr while performing the sacred duty of the Jordanian forces in Afghanistan," the official news agency Petra said. The agency provided no further details about his death.

The 7 CIA agents killed in the blast were returned to the US yesterday in a private ceremony. President Obama was NOT in attendance.

Seven flag-draped coffins were handed over to the officers' families in a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base attended by CIA Director Leon Panetta and other agency and national security officials, CIA spokesman George Little told ABC News.

[...]

No cameras were allowed in the ceremony and the names of the fallen officers were not released, although the names of several of the dead have been made public by their families. Two of the victims were female officers and at least one of them had been part of the unit hunting Osama bin Laden since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

Meanwhile, a US intelligence chief blasts the Afghanistan intelligence gathering operation as "clueless" and "ignorant".

America's deputy chief of military intelligence in Afghanistan has issued a damning indictment of the work of US spy agencies, calling them clueless and out of touch with the Afghan people.

Major General Michael Flynn described US spies as “ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced... and disengaged from people in the best position to find answers”.

Interested in reading the full report and its recommendations? It's available here for you (and al Qaeda) to read.