The biggest leaker of them all

All security leaks are bad....unless of course they are good for politics. Johnathan Alter explains that the Bush administration will condemn the leaking of information regarding it's illegal spying but not hesitate to leak other classified material if it will serve as a diversion.

Feb. 10, 2006 - Poor Porter Goss. First, the longtime Florida congressman leaves his safe seat to become director of the CIA, only to find that he’s been neutered by a new bureaucratic setup where he reports to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Then he writes an op-ed piece decrying intelligence leaks in The New York Times on Friday, the exact same day as a story appears identifying today’s biggest leaker of antiterrorism secrets in Washington—President George W. Bush.

For crass political reasons—namely to advance his position on the National Security Agency spying story—the president chose to use a speech to the National Guard Association to disclose details of a 2002 “shoe bomb” plot to blow up the U.S. Bank Tower, the tallest building in Los Angeles. While the plot had been revealed in general terms in the past, the White House this week arranged for Bush’s counterterrorism adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, to explain to reporters in a conference call exactly the kind of details that Goss claimed on the op-ed page helped the enemy. “We are at risk of losing a key battle,” Goss wrote. “The battle to protect our classification system.”

Of course they could offer no evidence that the illegal NSA spying had anything to do with foiling the plot or if indeed the plot was anymore serious than Padilla's "dirty bomb".

The White House made perfect political use of the twilight zone of intelligence. While Townsend did not explicitly claim that the NSA surveillance program had foiled the Los Angeles plot, she tried to imply that it might have played a role. “We use all available sources and methods in the intelligence community but we have to protect them,” she told reporters. “So I’m not going to talk about what ones we did or didn’t use in this particular case.”

Let’s get this straight. The president and administration officials will suddenly talk about details of the foiled plot—details that were highly classified until now. But they won’t say if the controversial NSA program was involved. Given their new willingness to talk at length about the case, can anyone seriously doubt that had the NSA eavesdropping cracked this case, they would have mentioned that? Simply saying that the NSA helped foil the plot—if it had—would not have compromised “sources and methods.” You can bet that if this were an NSA case, we’d know it.

We are dealing with an administration that cares only about politics. They don't care about national security and have no interest in actually governing and protecting. Their only interest is in winning and keeping power. I'm sorry, but I can't help but think they are upset about the NSA spying story coming to light because they have been spying not on terrorists but on enemies of the Bush/Rove/Cheney cabal.