How Twitter Nearly Ruined Obama’s Secret Trip to Afghanistan

President Barack Obama is on an unannounced trip to Kabul, Afghanistan, to sign a post-war agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai — but Twitter almost let the cat out of the bag, causing the White House to scramble to keep the president’s whereabouts secret.

Early Tuesday morning, a local Afghan news station tweeted that Obama landed in Afghanistan aboard Air Force One, according to Buzzfeed Politics.

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The problem with the tweet? The journey was supposed to be kept secret for security reasons. If an enemy of the U.S. got ahold of Obama’s itinerary, it could give them advance notice to set up some kind of attack on the president.

The tweet was first noticed in the American media by The Huffington Post‘s Joshua Hersh.

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The U.S. Embassy in Kabul quickly tweeted a denial of TOLO’s report, while the White House reached out to members of the press to quell the rumors.

But Hersh kept on the story.

Eventually, The Associated Press broke the story: Obama did indeed land in Afghanistan on an unannounced visit.

The Afghan station that originally tweeted the report, TOLOnews, has since deleted that tweet and replaced it with a report that the original story was false.

Obama will address the nation from Afghanistan at 7:30 p.m. ET Tuesday. His speech can be watched live at WhiteHouse.gov.

Images courtesy of Flickr, DVIDSHUB

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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