Looking For Intelligence
This just annoyed the hell out of me, reading this CBS article: CIA Head Bashes Wiretapping Disclosure.
The green are quotes from the article.
“The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission,” Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said a federal grand jury should be empanelled to determine “who is leaking this information.”
The only thing that was leaked by anyone other than the President was that wiretaps were taking place without warrants, which is a matter of law, not of security. If there had been warrants, nothing would have been revealed.
“This was not about domestic surveillance,” Negroponte said.
It is targeting people in the United States who are being monitored, ergo, it is domestic surveillance by definition.
“The president has not only confirmed the existence of the program, he has spoken at length about it repeatedly,” while keeping Congress in the dark, said Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the panel’s senior Democrat.
“The administration wants to have it both ways,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.
See, even Senators can figure it out.
Goss complained that leaks to the news media about the surveillance program and activities such as reported CIA secret prisons abroad had damaged his own agency’s work.
They are illegal and in violation of multiple treaties and national laws. People get annoyed when they are kidnapped and hauled off to be tortured in foreign countries.
“I also believe that there has been an erosion of the culture of secrecy and we’re trying to reinstall that,” Goss said.
“I’ve called in the FBI, the Department of Justice. It is my aim and it is my hope that we will witness a grand jury investigation with reporters present, being asked to reveal who is leaking this information,” he said.
Rockefeller suggested that the “leaks” Goss talked about most likely “came from the executive branch” of the government.
That brought a terse response from FBI Director Robert Mueller, who said, “It’s not fair to point a finger as to the responsibility of the leak.”
Maybe it was a bad idea to reveal the name of a CIA NOC agent, Porter. Maybe you should settle that problem first. You lost your WMD net for Southwest Asia when the White House did that.
Yo, Bob, only nine people outside the Executive branch knew about the program, and Porter Goss was one of the nine. Those nine had to figure that they would have their phones and e-mails monitored, as probably happened, so the leaks probably came from the Justice Department, from a lawyer who knew it was unconstitutional, or from the White House which had already been known to leak.