All The Leaks Fit To Prosecute

From IBD:

National Security: If the identity of Valerie Plame is worth sending Scooter Libby to prison, just what fate should befall those who disclose secret programs that just might have prevented the next 9-11?

Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, was back in court Friday for a hearing on his indictment for allegedly lying to the FBI about how he learned the identity of Plame, a CIA desk jockey, and when he subsequently told reporters.

The day before, FBI Director Porter Goss testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding leaks of genuine importance for which no one as yet has been charged — leaks that have endangered not the lives of individual agents, as charged in the Plame case, but the lives of potentially millions of Americans.

A legitimately outraged Goss told the committee that leaks to the media about classified government programs, such as reported CIA secret prisons abroad, did "severe" damage to the agency's work.

"I use the word 'very severe' intentionally," he said. "And I think the evidence will show that."
Goss reported that the leaks have caused a major "disruption to our plans, things that we have under way" and that certain CIA "assets" were "no longer viable or usable, or less effective by a large degree." He also noted that foreign intelligence agencies have become more mistrustful of their U.S. counterparts, lest their secrets wind up on the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times as well.

The agencies wonder why we can't keep a secret. And so do we. We also wonder how Plame's identity is supposed to be a state secret, but the fact that we're tapping al-Qaida's communications is not.

It is inconceivable to us that newspapers like the Post and Times would have divulged during World War II that we had broken the Japanese code before the Battle of Midway, or that the Allies had a machine that was translating the Nazi Wehrmacht's battle orders.

National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, who oversees all intelligence activities, strongly defended the NSA program, calling it crucial for protecting the nation against its most menacing threat.

"This was not about domestic surveillance," he insisted. No, it was about keeping the American people alive and free.

But when the Times in a Dec. 16 story revealed that the NSA eavesdropped on communications between terrorist suspects abroad and U.S. residents — a practice that every president since at least Jimmy Carter has considered legal, constitutional and necessary, and a practice that has already broken terrorist cells and their plots — it alerted al-Qaida that we were on to them.

The Times is not alone. On Sept. 28, 2001, USA Today disclosed that U.S. Special Forces were operating in Afghanistan, even as the Knight-Ridder organization, to its credit, held back the story so as not to endanger those hunting down the Taliban and al-Qaida.

In 1989, a famous debate took place on PBS in which this question was posed to a group of news people: If you were covering a war and traveling behind enemy lines and found out about a planned attack on American forces, would you warn the American troops?

The late Peter Jennings, to his credit, said he'd try to warn the Americans. But Mike Wallace of CBS said he was "astonished" by his colleague's answer. "No. No," he rebuked Jennings, "you're a reporter."

Don't warn the Americans. But it's OK to alert al-Qaida of our plans.

During World War II, the saying was that "loose lips sink ships." Today, in the age of potential biological, chemical or even nuclear mass murder and terror, loose lips can sink ships of state. But the attitude these days is that the public's "right to know" is greater than its right to be protected, and that freedom of the press is worth jeopardizing the efforts of those who defend it.

How many times do we have to say it? We are at war. Those who jeopardize its prosecution and jeopardize the safety of the American people by disclosing to the enemy information vital to our survival are far more worthy of investigation, indictment and incarceration than Scooter Libby.