The Secretest Administration

Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote an excellent column yesterday for The Wall Street Journal about the Bush administration's supposed historically high level of secrecy. Here's a part:

As in the Nixon era, America today is a country deeply divided over a controversial war. Today, as then, there is no shortage of disgruntled present and former government employees willing to dump secret documents into the public domain. Today, as then, these malefactors are aided by a press eager to glorify their actions.

But things have fundamentally changed in the decades that have elapsed, and for the worse. The Vietnam War documents that former Pentagon and State Department official Daniel Ellsberg provided to the New York Times in 1971, however sensitive, were all historical in nature. Not one page in the multi-volume collection of classified documents was written after 1968.

Today, the secrets that are routinely leaked to the press typically concern operational intelligence, i.e., secrets about ongoing intelligence programs. The New York Times's publication in 2006 of details of the joint CIA-Treasury program to monitor al Qaeda financial transactions is one of the most egregious cases in point. But one could cite many other damaging leaks.

The CIA's war against George W. Bush is probably the most underreported story in Washington. But who would report it, when every outlet wants to be the next one to get an exclusive story about classified information? From the bogus Plame-Wilson case to the leaks about the NSA surveillance program, the entrenched interests at the CIA have done everything they can to fight back against a president who wants the most effective intelligence-gathering organization we can get to defend our country against attack.


As Schoenfeld notes, every president has reserved the right to keep information classified, and especially during times of war. In fact, it's absolutely essential. The United States also happens to have a particularly good system of checks and balances through specially assigned intelligence courts and through Senate and House intelligence committees. And the fact is that we are in the middle of a war right now, and specifically a kind of war in which information may be the most crucial element of all.

And speaking of which, John Hinderaker at PowerLine Blog reports on the letter sent from Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Democrat Silvestre Reyes, about the NSA surveillance bill passed by the Senate; read it, it's a devastating indictment of the way House Democrats have been playing political games with our nation's security.