From the San Jose Mercury News:

U.S. counterterrorism authorities, exploiting a trove of information gleaned from computers and other gear captured with Al-Qaida chieftain Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, raced Sunday to identify individuals who they believe might be poised to launch attacks in the United States.



While interrogators worked urgently to pry information from the terror network's operations leader, FBI agents in the United States and CIA operatives overseas urgently ran down leads pulled from several computers, computer disks, paper documents, cell phones and other electronic paraphernalia seized in a raid near Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.



While one can understand the U.S. wanting to crow about Khalid's capture, and I'm no expert, it seems to me that keeping the whole thing quiet for a few weeks would have made the job of those trying to follow up leads on the new information a hell of a lot easier. This is kind of like the Allies doing a press release during WWII on the breaking of the Enigma codes.

Sure, the information on the capture could have leaked out from other sources that were not under the control of the government (most of them). Maybe this is what happened, and there was no point in keeping it quiet after that. I hope that our intelligence operations weren't hampered just by the desire to score a public relations coup.