What, Me Leak?
People who self-righteously denounce Karl Rove for outing a CIA agent, despite the fact that he has not even been accused of such (nor has Libby, for that matter), should read the following carefully (I’ll help out by highlighting the key phrase):
Poland served as the CIA’s main center to detain terrorist suspects in Europe at clandestine prisons, according to remarks by a Human Rights Watch investigator made public Friday.
The claim came even as Poland’s leaders continued to vigorously deny any involvement.
Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the rights organization, told Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza that Human Rights Watch had documents corroborating its case about Poland, and showing Romania was a transit point for moving prisoners.
“Poland was the main base of interrogating prisoners and Romania was more of a hub,” Garlasco told the newspaper in an interview in Geneva, Switzerland. “This is what our sources from the CIA tell us and what is shown from the documents we gathered.”
A question, then: aren’t CIA agents government employees? Does it matter if they are endangered by their own co-workers? Is it not undeniable that far more people are endangered by leaks of this sort than by leaks concerning a semi-retired weapons analyst?
Where’s the outrage?
(The question is, of course, rhetorical)…
I’m sorry. I missed the rhetorical point. Whose lives were put in danger by this revelation? (As contrasted with the lives of Plame’s contacts abroad, whose lives may have been put in jeopardy by the revelation that she was CIA.)
Jacques, good point about Plame’s contacts, but did these prisons operate in a vacuum? Did they not serve a purpose, or have employees, or house dangerous terrorists?
Here’s one story:
As calls for intelligence-related reviews grow on Capitol Hill, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said Thursday his committee will study several specific leaks of classified information, including a Nov. 2 Washington Post story that discussed the existence of secret CIA prisons overseas.
The story said the “black sites” were in eight countries, including democracies in Eastern Europe. Hoekstra would not confirm the story’s accuracy or whether the prisons exist.
“The depth of the leaks that we have seen in the intelligence community over the last 12 to 18 months have done irreparable harm to our ability to effectively conduct the war on terror,” Hoekstra said.
Here’s another:
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) yesterday called on the intelligence committees of both chambers to initiate a joint investigation into the leak of potentially classified information following a newspaper story about secret CIA prisons.
…In their letter, Frist and Hastert wrote: “The leaking of classified information by employees of the United States government appears to have increased in recent years, establishing a dangerous trend that, if not addressed swiftly and firmly, likely will worsen. The unauthorized release of classified information is serious and threatens our nation’s security. It also puts the lives of many Americans and the security of our nation at risk.”
Now, these are Republicans, true, but then, it is Democrats who are mostly screaming bloody murder about Plame.
Just for the record, I AM NOT saying it is okay to out a CIA agent for partisan purposes (and again, I stress than no one is accused of that by the Special Prosecutor – not spin, fact), but I am calling attention to ’selective’ outrage (while admitting I sometimes engage in it myself – what can I say? I often fail to live up to my own standards)…
Are you arguing that the revelation of the existence of these “black sites” put the lives of those CIA employees in jeopardy?
Or are you arguing that the revelation is a setback in the WarOnTerror (because, damnit, we need to have places where we can torture suspected terrorists away from the prying eyes of the Red Cross)?
Those are rather different arguments, no?
I’m not arguing either – I’m arguing that some people (present company excepted, of course) who never had any use for the CIA, and indeed, looked at it with distaste, protesting, for example, when its recruiters came to campus, are all of a sudden absolutely appalled that Valerie Plame was ‘outed’ (never mind that no one has made a legal case that she was), and of course, it has nothing to do with their distaste for Karl Rove or Dick Cheney or George Bush…just pure coincidence that they discovered this newfound concern for the CIA, I suppose…
I find it grimly ironic that there are people on the far-left vigorously defending the CIA, while there are people on the far-right equally vigorously attacking it.
But, then, I find many things about our current situation grimly ironic (for instance, as we’ve discussed before, how — somewhere along the line — the neoconservatives abandoned realpolitik for idealism in foreign policy, or how the Republicans morphed into the party of “Borrow and Spend”).
Well, I can’t take issue with that…ironies abound in the post-9/11 world…but I hope I’m not perceived as attacking the CIA, which I think is a vitally important agency. I just feel like the culture of leaking has truly (and I mean this in all sincerity, and not from a partisan angle) gotten out of hand…