Don't Blame The Whistleblowers

On Saturday, I wrote about the firing of a CIA agent who leaked information about the secret torture prisons to the Washington Post. This firing, while within the right of the CIA, does appear to be part of a partisan campaign by the White House to stop a series of leaks that have been damaging to them politically (as opposed to the White's House politically-motivated leaks, which are supposedly 'good for America'). As usual, the White House's top priorities seem to be secrecy and their public image rather than a genuine concern for the letter of the law. CBS' Bob Schieffer weighed in on this issue on 'Face The Nation'-

At my age, nothing much surprises me, but my jaw dropped when I read the FBI has been trying to go through the files of dead columnist Jack Anderson to see if he had any classified documents.

Mind you, Anderson was 83 when he died and did virtually no work for 15 years because of Parkinson's, but the FBI has been pressing his family to get at those files. The family said no.

Dare I state the obvious: that with Osama Bin Laden still on the loose, maybe there are more important things for the FBI to do.

And it happened the same week the CIA fired an agent for hanging out with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing the CIA is operating a secret prison system. The Justice Department will decide whether to bring charges.

Almost every day now brings news of another leak investigation, but it's not the leakers, it's what they're leaking that scares me.

After all, why should a democracy be operating secret prisons anyway? If the government hadn't told us they exist, can we ever be sure who might wind up inside them?

Isn't finding out stuff like that what reporters are supposed to do?

Yes. Yes, it is.

Luckily, the Democrats haven't stayed silent on this issue, pointing out the partisan double-standard being employed here. Rep. Jane Harman (ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) said, "while leaks are wrong, I think it is totally wrong for our president in secret to selectively declassify certain information and empower people in his White House to leak it to favored reporters so that they can discredit political enemies". And Sen. Kerry stated that, "A CIA agent has an obligation to uphold the law, and clearly leaking is against the law. And nobody should leak... [However] you have somebody being fired from the CIA for allegedly telling the truth, and you have no one fired from the White House for revealing a CIA agent in order to support a lie. That underscores what's really wrong in Washington, D.C." Bolded added by me for emphasis. This really is the issue here. The White House leaked to hurt a political enemy and support the false information that lead to war; others like this agent have leaked to expose potential wrongdoing by the government. As I noted in my entry on Saturday, the President's actions here (or inaction in the case of the leaks from the White House) are a little too reminiscent of the Nixon White House for my tastes.

The right-wingers meanwhile are beside themselves with glee over the firing, demanding prosecution and jail-time for this agent and other leakers (ie. those who exposed the warrantless wiretapping programs). The use of torture and secret prisons is of no concern to any of the ones I read today. In fact, many state the prisons don't even exist and it was all a lie (ignore that the White House has yet to deny the existence of the prisons). Yet, whether they want to accept the reality of these prisons or not, all rely on the same talking point that exposing information like this hurts the 'war effort'. I wonder if they believe that Congress attempted to 'hurt the war effort' when they passed a law last Fall (by a veto-proof majority margin) banning torture completely. Keep in mind these are the same people who believe the war is going well, Abu Ghraib was just fraternity pranks, and Sec. Rumsfeld is doing a remarkable job.

Also, Andrew McCarthy at National Review (where conservative conventional wisdom is born) states-

Mary McCarthy's position — the post from which she is likely to have learned the most sensitive information at the heart of the leak controversy — was inside the CIA's inspector general's office. This is the unit that investigates internal misconduct. This is the unit to which government employees are encouraged to report government abuse or illegality so it can be investigated, potentially reported to Congress, and prosecuted if appropriate.

That is, it is the legal alternative to leaking national secrets to the media.

Ahhh yes, the old 'if she believed there had been wrongdoing, she should have gone through the proper channels' line. How naive and ridiculous. Concerned government and military personnel regularly file concerns of abuse and their superiors promptly write up the report on the ol' invisible typewriter.

I am immediately reminded again of President Nixon and Mark Felt (Deep Throat). When Felt revealed himself last year, Nixon administration criminals like G. Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson were furious and spoke out against the leaks that exposed to America the seedy underbelly of that administration. Colson said "Mark Felt could have stopped Watergate. He was in a position of that kind of influence." Liddy said "If he possessed evidence of wrongdoing, he was honor-bound to take that to a grand jury and secure an indictment, not to selectively leak it to a single news source." Of course, as I noted at the time, Felt likely had tried to go through the proper channels, but the White House (including people like Liddy and Colson) were engaging in a massive coverup that made that impossible. Going around them by leaking to the press was the only way to get any movement on the issue. Does Mr. McCarthy and his National Review friends believe that Felt was a traitor and deserves prosecution? He's still at large, you know... I'll call the FBI, should they move in?

And Mark Kleiman believes that the CIA agent here won't be prosecuted, because the White House doesn't want this issue spotlighted in the press or take the chance that a major legal battle would ensue that they would likely lose.

There is a big difference between leaking and blowing the whistle on a crime. This woman did the latter.

Ultimately, Bob Schieffer is right- the American people do deserve to know if their government is operating secret prisons. A democracy has no business engaging in the actions that we decry in our enemies. And the media has an obligation to help bring that information to light. The agent who exposed it may be out of a job now, but she deserves our gratitude for letting us know what is being done in our name.

[UPDATE: The agent has denied she was the source of the leaks. The saga continues.]