Does Mary O’Neil McCarthy, former CIA employee, consider herself a FOO (by which I don’t mean the ghod beloved by science fiction fans)? Surely not! Her explanation of her motives for leaking classified information to a Washington Post reporter probably parallels the newspaper’s own:
Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. said people who provide citizens the information they need to hold their government accountable should not “come to harm for that.”
“The reporting that Dana [Priest, the leakee] did was very important accountability reporting about how the CIA and the rest of the U.S. government have been conducting the war on terror,” Downie said. “Whether or not the actions of the CIA or other agencies have interfered with anyone's civil liberties is important information for Americans to know and is an important part of our jobs.”
Government accountability is not to be scoffed at, and a reader who relied solely on the Post would learn of no balancing considerations, other than a general statement by a Republican Senator that Miss Priest’s disclosures –
“hindered our efforts in the war against al Qaeda,” although he did not say how.
One is surprised that the writer wasn’t enterprising enough to ferret out the hindrances to which the Senator might be referring, such as those mentioned by Byron York in a January 30th article in National Review (not on-line):
On November 2, the Post reported that the CIA “has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaeda captives” at secret sites in “several democracies in Eastern Europe.” The program, which was so highly classified that few in the federal government knew about it, was, the Post reported, “a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism.” The paper did not name the countries involved [though describing them as “democracies in Eastern Europe” rather narrows the field – TV], acceding to the requests of U.S. officials who “argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.”
Almost immediately, however, the European press—along with National Public Radio in the United States— reported that Poland and Romania were the European countriesinvolved. . . .
In Europe, the reaction was immediate andintense. . . . [T]he EU said it would launch a probe of both Poland, which is an EU member, and Romania, which hopes to become one. Both countries might be punished if the story were true, EU officialssaid. . . .
[I]n Poland, the story caused enormous anger and unhappiness behind the scenes. In an interview with National Review, one source with knowledge of the Polish government’s dilemma would not address the facts of the story, but called the damage “horrific.” The source cited two reasons. First, the Polish government believes that it is now, as a result of the Post story, on al-Qaeda’s hit list, setting off fears that Warsaw or Krakow could follow Madrid and London as European terrorist targets. And second, the leak shook the pro-American Polish government’s faith in the United States. Poland has been a loyal ally of the U.S., sending troops to Iraq and keeping them there when others withdrew. That decision has been costly not only in lives—17 Poles have died in Iraq—but also in terms of Poland’s relations with largely anti-U.S. European governments. And now Poland worries about whether it can trust its most powerful ally. “The next time we are asked to do an operation in common, we will always think twice about your intelligence community’s ability to keep a secret,” the source said.
That is real, serious, and possibly lasting damage to America’s national security. The secret-prison leak, as Bush administration officials argued when they tried to [persuade] the Post not to publish the story, had real consequences.
If guys at WaPo don’t read National Review, they might have dug up the possibility – it was reported in the New York Times – that all or part of what Mrs. McCarthy peddled was false, which might shed a different light on the “accountability” rationale. Investigations by the European Union have yet to turn up any sign of the “secret prisons”.
Still, it’s possible to imagine situations in which the good of exposing governmental wrongdoing would so outweigh the harm to national security that a whistle blower would not deserve to be punished. To suppose, though, that this was one of those instances requires making assumptions that, viewed soberly, seem quite strange.
It’s easy to figure out why the CIA might want to keep the whereabouts of al-Qa’eda bigwigs, and the fact that they were in custody, secret: to forestall rescue attempts, to create uncertainty in the enemy’s mind about the status of missing leaders, to shield cooperative prisoners from retaliation and to minimize hostile propaganda opportunities, among others.
One can also imagine, if one has a sufficiently robust belief in American malevolence, that the prisoners are in reality innocent victims subjected to torture. CIA agent McCarthy and Post reporter Priest evidently concluded that this scenario was likely enough that readily foreseeable harm to our country’s ability to fight al-Qa’eda had to take second place to warning against the evil. What’s more, their decision to make the matter public implies their conviction that resort to the established procedures for informing the Congressional intelligence committees of misconduct would be futile. Not only, in their opinion, were CIA and other Executive Branch officials acting abominably, but their overseers in the Legislature wouldn’t care.
What an astonishingly paranoid perception of one’s own countrymen! It presumes away the good faith of a sizable number of elected and appointed officials and the efficacy of institutional safeguards, giving the benefit of every doubt to those whom the U.S. regards as hostile. Presuming that way is reasonable for governments with long records of secrecy, suppression and tyranny. But anyone who applies them to the United States is, to be blunt, either a conscious friend of our enemies or a useful idiot.
About now Leftoid readers, if this blog has any such, are sneering at my naïve faith in George W. Bush and his cronies. So you think the government is always right, do you? What
My reply is that governments do act badly, and the pressures of war lead to follies and blunders, many of them dreadful. On the other hand, if we let only perfectly wise and trustworthy governments have the tools needed to wage war, we will be defeated.
Ultimately, I think, those who worry more about hypothetical violations of the civil liberties of al-Qa’eda members than about real setbacks to our capacity to fight terrorism understand that complete openness and an expansive view of the rights of enemy combatants are not winning strategies. But that doesn’t bother them. They believe either that there isn’t really a war going on or that the “Bush regime” is so horrendous that deposing it from power takes precedence over victory.
It would be a great clarifying moment if people like Mary O. McCarthy, Dana Priest and Leonard Downie Jr. would make their world view explicit and tell us why they see no harm in their amateur declassification program. Let them proclaim frankly that, in their eyes, Islamofascism is no big deal or George W. Bush is a tyrant. Then the nation can have an open, honest debate about how bureaucrats and journalists should conduct themselves. If the conclusion is that we should stop fighting Osama bin-Laden and his ilk, it will at least be a conscious decision arrived at through Constitutional deliberations, not one imposed by the unilateral actions of a handful of unelected leakers and their accomplices in the news media.
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