Eli Lake and Sara Carter report in a Washington Times exclusive that the CIA has asked the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the leak of a classified but never implemented program to assassinate al-Qaeda leaders. Leon Panetta got bushwhacked by the revelation earlier this summer as his fellow Democrats tried to use it to rescue Nancy Pelosi from her rhetorical limb after she publicly accused the CIA of lying to Congress about its activities. Now he wants to know who spilled the beans:
Besieged by leaks of several closely held secrets, the CIA has asked the Justice Department to examine what it regards as the criminal disclosure of a secret program to kill foreign terrorist leaders abroad, The Washington Times has learned.
Two U.S. intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because of the sensitivity of the case, said the leak investigation involved a program that CIA Director Leon E. Panetta told Congress about in June and that surfaced in news reports just a month later.
The vice chairman of the the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declined to discuss any possible leak investigations but told the Times on Thursday that a growing number of disclosures of highly secret programs, tactics and other information had caused “irreparable damage” to the U.S. intelligence community.
“They foil our attempts to carry out classified missions,” Sen. Christopher S. Bond said in an interview. “They tell our intelligence community: We don’t have your back; we’re stabbing you in the back. Our allies ask us, ‘How can we trust you to deal in classified matters in private, when the details are leaked to the press?'”
For a moment, let’s savor the irony here. We learn about the CIA’s demand for investigation into leaks … from a leak. Where’s a plumber, or a Plumber, when you need one?
The DoJ should start plugging the holes at Langley and elsewhere in the government. The constant stream of leaking not only erodes our security but embarrasses the US abroad. Other spook agencies can keep secrets, but the CIA seems almost congenitally incapable of doing so. It doesn’t help when one political party decides to declare war on the agency for their own petty ends, either, but the leaks are worse, especially because they appear coordinated with those petty partisan ends.
Which leads to this question: what does Panetta expect the DoJ to report? This is, after all, a Democratic administration, one already inclined to politicize investigations and prosecutions, as we’ve seen with AG Eric Holder’s decisions on the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia and the CIA interrogators in the Bush era. If the leak of the never-activated assassination program came from Pelosi allies, does Panetta really expect Holder to expose that? Or is Panetta playing for a little CYA in the halls of Langley? That would certainly explain the leak about a demand to plug leaks.
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