Free Republic

Headline by headline, a trickle of news leaks on Iraq and the antiterror campaign has grown into a steady stream of revelations, and from Pennsylvania Avenue to Downing Street, Copenhagen to Canberra, governments are responding with pressure and prosecutions. The latest target is The New York Times. But the unfolding story begins as far back as 2003, when British weapons expert David Kelly was "outed" as the source of a story casting doubt on his government's arguments for invading Iraq, and he committed suicide.

When is it OK to sacrifice national security for personal gain or political one-upmanship? For the common-sense-challenged, the answer is: "Never." In the years since Sept. 11, an odd assembly of Capitol Hill-types, their staffers and disgruntled federal employees from myriad intelligence agencies have played the "gotcha game" with the White House's methods of protecting the citizenry. Enabled by the media (which, by the way, have Ph.D.s in "gotcha"), they have become desensitized to the reasons some things must remain secret. They're making secret-revealing an extreme sport. Intentional, or even unintentional, leaks dry up productive intelligence-gathering techniques; Americans are placed...

In the same week that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent his antic epistle to President Bush ("I have no doubt that telling lies is reprehensible in any culture"), a House subcommittee released a report on the U.S.'s public diplomacy efforts around the Islamic world titled "State Department Efforts to Engage Muslim Audiences Lack Certain Communications Elements and Face Significant Challenges." That's an understatement. Among the "significant challenges" to getting a coherent U.S. message out to the Arab world, one might include the odd recent habit of employees at the CIA to leak to the press key elements of the government's...

In the same week that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent his antic epistle to President Bush ("I have no doubt that telling lies is reprehensible in any culture"), a House subcommittee released a report on the U.S.'s public diplomacy efforts around the Islamic world titled "State Department Efforts to Engage Muslim Audiences Lack Certain Communications Elements and Face Significant Challenges." That's an understatement. Among the "significant challenges" to getting a coherent U.S. message out to the Arab world, one might include the odd recent habit of employees at the CIA to leak to the press key elements of the government's...

To understand what went so badly wrong at the CIA under Porter Goss, it's worth examining the career of his executive director, the onomatopoetic Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. His rise illustrates the conservative cronyism, leak paranoia and political vendettas that undermined Goss's tenure. -- snip -- The chronic mismanagement of the CIA under Goss and Murray has been an open secret for many months, and the real question is why it took the Bush White House so long to fix it. When I posed this question a few weeks ago to a senior administration official, he repeated the line that the...

Though the investigation into who “outed” Plame was premised on the notion that (a) her identity was not publicly known before Robert Novak’s article in July 2003 and (b) the disclosure came from the Administration—particularly persons in the White House to somehow “punish” Wilson, there is increasing evidence that Wilson himself widely divulged that information to burnish his own credentials as an expert. I reported long ago that at the June 14, 2003 EPIC conference (where he listed his wife as Valerie Plame in the program) Wilson revealed he was the Ambassador who was the source for the May 2003...

"The same unit [the Office of Special Plans] that fed Chalabi's intelligence on WMD to Rumsfeld was also feeding him Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq," said a leading US government expert on the Middle East. Says a former US ambassador with strong links to the CIA: "There was certainly information coming from the Iraqi exile community, including Chalabi--who was detested by the CIA and by the State Department--saying, 'They will welcome you with open arms.'"

In a development that got no media play over the weekend, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby's defense lawyer announced on Friday that he has located five witnesses who will testify that Joe Wilson outed his wife Valerie Plame as a CIA employee before Robert Novak did so in his July 2003 column. According to the NationalReviewOnline's Byron York, Libby's lawyer Ted Wells told the court that his witnesses "will say under oath that Mr. Wilson told them his wife worked for the CIA." Wells said that he expects Leakgate Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to call Wilson to testify in a bid to...

Another suggestion: who "outed" Plame I said that Wilson revealed he was the Ambassador who was the source for the May 2003 Nicholas Kristof piece and the June 2003 Walter Pincus piece, in which he falsely accused the Administration of jiggering evidence on June 14, 2003 at the Washington EPIC conference (where he also listed his wife’s name as “Valerie Plame.”) There’s ample reason to believe he flourished her name and connection to the agency in greater detail regularly, which makes the entire investigation into who publicly disclosed her identity particularly ridiculous. A shrewd reader at Free Republic has found...

WASHINGTON, April 25 — The Central Intelligence Agency on Tuesday defended the firing of Mary O. McCarthy, the veteran officer who was dismissed last week, and challenged her lawyer's statements that Ms. McCarthy never provided classified information to the news media. But intelligence officials would not say whether they believed that Ms. McCarthy had been a source for a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in The Washington Post about secret C.I.A. detention centers abroad. Media accounts have linked Ms. McCarthy's firing to the articles, but the C.I.A. has never explicitly drawn such a connection (snip) A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise...

Journalism, like politics, depends on a slew of useful fictions. They're too numerous to list here (besides, they make for so many useful column topics, I'd hate to preempt myself). But it is worth pausing to watch as a new myth is sculpted before our very eyes. Over the last decade or so the media has carefully cultivated an ingenious distinction. Call it: whistleblowers versus leakers. You've surely seen both of these mesmerizing creatures on display in the carnival menagerie that is your nightly news. "Whistleblowers" reveal things "America needs to hear." "Leakers" have grubby agendas. Interestingly, whistleblowers, despite the...

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Times Co. said Wednesday that it expects lower profits in the first quarter and reported uneven advertising results for February amid weakness at its New England media group, which includes The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. The company, which also publishes the International Herald Tribune and a group of regional newspapers, forecast net income of 22 cents to 24 cents per share, which includes estimated costs for job cuts of 3 cents to 4 cents per share. Excluding the charges, analysts polled by Thomson Financial had expected earnings of 29...

March 7, 2006 Expect Journalistic Tongues to Loosen By Jack Kelly Journalists will be paying rapt attention when Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman go on trial next month for violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were officials of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. They received classified information from Lawrence Franklin, an analyst at the Department of Defense, which they passed on to an Israeli diplomat, and to journalists. They are the first private citizens ever to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Mr. Franklin pled guilty Jan. 20th and was sentenced to more than...

The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws. In recent weeks, dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have been interviewed by agents from the FBI's Washington field office, who are investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA's warrantless domestic surveillance program, according to law enforcement and...

Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events. The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from...

I just received this update from Sibel Edmonds and I am sure you will find it interesting and another peel of the oinion... "Update: Judge Reggie Walton canceled/postponed the hearing on June 14, 10:00 AM, with no reason cited, and no future date scheduled. This is the fourth time he has done this in the past two years!!! However, Daniel Ellsberg and I are still on. We'll be in front of the Court (3rd and Constitution Ave.) on Monday, June 14, at 9:30 AM, to hold our press conference and to deliver speeches Re: Gagging the Congress, blocking IG report,...

UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL The Department of Justice has abandoned its argument that charges made by a fired FBI translator are secret, paving the way for a court case involving charges of incompetence, poor security and possible espionage in the translation unit of the bureau's Washington field office. At issue are accusations by Sibel Edmonds, a contract translator for the FBI hired in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mrs. Edmonds, fluent in Turkish and in the Farsi language spoken in Iran, reported that many of those hired to work in the unit barely could speak English; that they...

WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court turned aside efforts to open to the public closed-door arguments Thursday in the case of a fired FBI contractor who alleged there were security breaches and misconduct at the bureau. Sibel Edmonds is seeking to revive her lawsuit against the government. It was thrown out of U.S. District Court when the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to withhold information to safeguard national security. Edmonds says she was dismissed from her job as a wiretap translator because she told superiors she suspected a co-worker was leaking information to targets...

I was listening to the John Batchelor Program last night. Jed Babbin, of the American Spectator, was a guest last night, Friday, February 3, 2006. Babbin said several things last night: 1) The Justice Department investigation into the leaking of the NSA program is pointing to Capital Hill. 2) The Justice Department is looking to use polygraphs on members of Congress and their staffers. 3) Any Senate member of Congress who refuses a polygraph directive by the Justice Department automatically loses their security clearance if they have one. 4) The names being rumored to be a target of the investigation...

Tired of seeing the New York Times getting all the headlines with their treason, the Washington Post has decided to join in the fun of betraying its country's most vital national secrets.This self-styled military expert, William Arkin, must surely be aware it is a gross and illegal violation of national security to release code names. (Ask Kissinger about "Umbra.") Of course that didn't stop him from writing a book that does just that a year ago, either.In fact, Mr. Arkin considers himself more of an activist than a journalist. (Not that there is any discernible difference in our one party...