Monday, December 19, 2005

Who do you Trust?

I was reminded today about one of my older posts highlighting the idiocy of our Congress when it come to keeping National Security secure and keeping secrets secret. The article cited was from Jeff Babin and noted the following:
It's been about two years since Sen.
Richard Shelby blew one of our most important secrets -- that we were bugging
Osama bin Laden's cell phone, a fact that could have led to the capture of
America's most wanted terrorist -- by bragging about it to a reporter. Shelby's
action (if it really was him) has never been prosecuted. Why not?

He went on to talk about the members of the Senate Select Committee on intelligence:

Three members of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence have apparently committed a very serious crime by
blabbing about a highly-classified satellite program to the press last week. If
these men actually did what it appears they did, we ought to throw the book at
'em for divulging one of our most-protected secrets: stealthy reconnaissance
satellites. As a result of their revelations to the public and the press, three
U.S. Senators -- Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who's also the ranking Dem on
the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Ron Wyden
(D-Ore.) -- are the subject of a "criminal referral" made on Monday for speaking
publicly about this satellite. Such referrals are made to the Justice Department
by the administration when criminal conduct is suspected.

Now some of these same people are crying about not being in the loop about the NSA intercepts of foreign communications (Rockeffeller is one and has been briefed on this operation. He is still on the intelligence Committee).

What ever came of this breach of security? Nothing that I could find. Tell me again that this latest dustup is not political. Would you tell the Congress-at-large anything that needed to be kept even confidential , much less Secret? They have more leaks than old plumbing. And apparently so does the CIA and the NSA. There needs to be a serious house cleaning in all three. There is this and then the leaks about the CIA covert airline flights, the covert detention centers, and the covert operations with the NSA. Yet outing Valerie Plame is such a scandalous evil scheme that it needs to be investigated for two years and two Grand Juries when no crime has even been charged in the original compaint. Hell no, none of this is political.