Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush said that much of America’s victories against terrorists would be ‘secret in success.’ Covert cyber attacks should theoretically fall into that category, should they not?

That’s what makes this AP report mildly curious:

The State Department has launched a different sort of raid against al-Qaeda — hacking into al-Qaeda websites in Yemen.

In a rare public admission of the covert cyber war against extremists, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says cyber experts based at the State Department hacked Yemeni tribal websites, replacing al-Qaeda propaganda that bragged about killing Americans.

“Within 48 hours, our team plastered the same sites with altered versions of the ads that showed the toll al-Qaeda attacks have taken on the Yemeni people,” Clinton said Wednesday.

With Hillary’s closest aid – Huma Abedin – having extensive familial ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that doesn’t want al-Qaeda to muck up the works relative to the Brotherhood’s stealth jihad campaign, could this news be a warning to al-Qaeda not to act up?