Terrible, but not at all surprising:
When the New York Times published a series of articles on top-secret counterterrorism efforts at the National Security Agency in 2006 and 2007, supporters of the Bush administration reacted with outrage. Oddly, though, the same people who expressed outrage over the exposure of Valerie Plame as a CIA analyst never got terribly exercised over these breaches of national security (and to be fair, the same holds true in reverse). The Bush administration complained loudly about the Times’ decision to expose these programs but never made a public show of a probe to discover the source of the leaks.
Ironically, that effort apparently succeeded in uncovering at least one leaker — and the Obama administration gets the credit for it:
A former senior executive with the National Security Agency has been indicted on 10 felony charges related to the leaking of classified information to a national newspaper in 2006 and 2007, the Justice Department announced Thursday morning.
Thomas A. Drake, 52, headed an office in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate at Fort Meade between 2001 and 2005, and continued to work with the agency as a high-ranking contractor through 2008, U.S. officials said. The indictment alleges that Drake allegedly exchanged hundreds of e-mails with an unidentified reporter for a national newspaper and served as a source for its articles about Bush administration intelligence policies between February 2006 and November 2007, U.S. officials said.
Everyone on our side suspected this to be the case – that someone in the intelligence community was deliberately leaking info to the MSM. Only question: was this man a traitor for money, or for ideology? Meaning, was he getting paid for his stories, or was he doing it because he disliked Bush Administration policies.
If it was for money, 10 years or so in jail is sufficient – if it did it for ideology, then it must be life in prison. Why? Because employees of the government are not permitted to dissent from policy set by elected officials. They can put up with it, or they can quit – and that is all. Selective leaking of documents by a junior bureaucrat is not just a violation of trust, but also a threat to American security because the junior bureaucrat simply cannot know all the info which went in to making the decision he disagrees with.
And, yes, if any conservative in the ranks violates such a public trust to leak Obama Administration policy secrets then I’ll want him roasted on a spit, to (in a manner of speaking, of course).
As an aside, I take issue with Morrisey’s comparison of this to the Plame case – Plame wasn’t covert and her name wasn’t leaked. But, be that as it may, the assertion still stands: break trust, and pay a high price.
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