CIA leak update: Everything old is new again

My, my. The things one finds on Google.

Key graf from Dan’s post:

Unarchived in 2002: U.S. officials who defend the renditions say the prisoners are sent to these third countries not because of their coercive questioning techniques, but because of their cultural affinity with the captives. Besides being illegal, they said, torture produces unreliable information from people who are desperate to stop the pain.

Pulitzer in 2005: It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials.

Did Priest’s sources lie to her in 2002 about the real reason for rendition? Or did she get herself some new sources for Prison Story v2.0? The plot’s so thick now you need a chainsaw to cut through it.

JG comments at length about what we know thus far. The American Thinker, meanwhile, is going for the gold. Teaser: “Could the Wilson-McCarthy-Africa connection … indicate another instance of US intelligence and Foreign Service personnel taking advantage of regulatory loopholes and lax security in third world countries for personal gain?”

Update: Rick Moran says Goss might be ready to start going after ex-agents, which could mean bad news for the leak-if-it-feels-right crowd at VIPS. Why ex-agents? Check out this e-mail Former Spook says he received from someone on the inside:

“I got a call from inside the government. Someone wanted me to let people know that the people who were fired by Goss and/or have left thegovernment to write books have gone to work for intel outside contractors where they have just put on their badges and go right back into the agency and hang around just like before. I am told that they are in the lunch room talking to GS-10s and11s, and 12s to stir up a revolt.”

Could security be that bad inside CIA headquarters? Would anything surprise you anymore?

Update: Dana Priest chatted online with readers today at WaPo. Money quote:

[Bill Bennett] seems to be of the camp that the government and only the government should decide what the public should know in the area of national security. In this sense, his views run contrary to the framers of the Constitution who believed a free press was essential to maintaining not just a democracy, but a strong, vibrant democracy in which major policy is questions are debated in the open.

Right. If anyone’s going to decide what we should and shouldn’t know about national security, it should be Dana Priest and Mary McCarthy.

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