"Ex-CIA agent to face charges in leak" Associated Press, July 21, 2012
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A judge rejected claims Friday from a former CIA officer that he is the victim of vindictive prosecution and refused to drop charges that he allegedly leaked covert operatives’ names to journalists.
Related: Obama Defends Dick Cheney
Sure looks vindictive to me.
Lawyers for John Kiriakou sought to have most of the charges against him dismissed, arguing in court papers that the case is retribution for public statements by Kiriakou that portrayed the CIA in an unflattering light. They said similar leaks have not been subject to criminal prosecution.
See: Alphabet Agency: CIA Water Sports
Worse things than that have gone on down there, which is why the place will never be closed and why they will never release those men.
At Friday’s hearing, the judge cut off the argument before it began, ruling that the prosecution would go forward.
US District Judge Leonie Brinkema called the defense arguments ‘‘interesting’’ and ‘‘provocative’’ but said they failed to meet the high burden necessary to dismiss charges.
She also expressed skepticism about the claim of selective prosecution, noting that the Obama administration has increased the number of prosecutions against those who allegedly leak government secrets.
Is that the change you wanted, America? Truth-tellers to be prosecuted?
She cited a case currently on her docket, that of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who is accused of leaking classified information about covert operations in Iran to a New York Times reporter.
Kiriakou’s lawyers, Robert Trout and Plato Cacheris, also sought to have charges tossed out as impermissibly vague.
Brinkema said she would issue a written ruling later on the defense motion, but expressed skepticism that it is the court’s role to decide whether classified information should or should not be classified. And she said it seems clear that disclosing the names of classified operatives would fall outside the protections of the First Amendment.
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Related: Obama Can't Plug Leaks
Why would he want to?
Good leak:
"Feinstein suggests some in White House leaked info" Associated Press, July 24, 2012
WASHINGTON — The Democratic leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Monday that the White House appears to be responsible for some leaks of classified information.
‘‘I think the White House has to understand that some of this is coming from their ranks,’’ Senator Dianne Feinstein told a World Affairs Council forum....
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"Romney raps security leaks, top Democrat cools criticism; Republican hopeful says White House bears the blame" by Callum Borchers and Bryan Bender | Globe Correspondent | Globe Staff, July 25, 2012
Mitt Romney accused President Obama’s White House Tuesday of leaking classified national security secrets, citing a similar charge by the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
But shortly after Romney delivered his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Reno, the intelligence chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, backed off her earlier suggestion that someone on Obama’s staff was the source of the leak. And, she said, she regretted being used by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
In his address, Romney stopped short of saying the president himself had leaked classified information used in recent news reports. But he alleged that someone in the White House was responsible and that the security breaches were political — intended to make Obama appear tough on terrorism in an election year.
Isn't that the same s*** Bush did?
“Exactly who in the White House betrayed these secrets? Did a superior authorize it?” Romney said. “These are things that Americans are entitled to know — and they are entitled to know it now.”
We are entitled to know so many things, but.... sigh. Sick of these s*** fooleys.
The remarks by Romney, who flew to London later in the day for a week of meetings with European leaders, followed Feinstein’s statement Monday that “the White House has to understand that some of this [leaked information] is coming from their ranks.”
Related: Summer Olympics Safe and Secure
Her accusation marked the first time a high-profile Democrat had challenged Obama’s assertion that his White House is not behind the leaks.
“The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national security information is offensive,” Obama said last month. “It’s wrong.”
Within an hour of Romney’s speech, Feinstein backed off her comment.
“I stated that I did not believe the president leaked classified information. I shouldn’t have speculated beyond that,” Feinstein said, “because the fact of the matter is I don’t know the source of the leaks.”
The Romney campaign responded by suggesting Feinstein had been pressured to recant.
“Yesterday, she was speaking candidly about the leaks originating from this White House. Today, she was forced to walk it back,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said.
Feinstein’s intelligence committee discussed the leaks in a closed session Tuesday afternoon. The Globe requested comment from the committee’s seven Democrats, in addition to Feinstein; none agreed to speak on the record.
A spokesperson for Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that with no hard evidence connecting the Obama White House to the leaks, Kerry “isn’t shooting from the hip on such a serious subject.”
The uproar over intelligence leaks began last month, after a series of news reports and a book by Newsweek correspondent Daniel Klaidman revealed classified details of national security operations.
The leaks included reports of a pair of computer viruses developed by the United States and Israel — one that reportedly caused significant setbacks in Iran’s ability to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, and another to eavesdrop on the regime’s e-mails, telephone calls, and other communications.
That's odd; just the other day Netanyahu told Panetta Iran hasn't been slowed down one iota.
See: Obama Campaign Springs a Leak
Israel Puts Flame Under Iran
They could put it under you, and maybe already have.
A third leak — considered by many experts to be more damaging — was the revelation that the United States had a double agent in the ranks of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is considered the most dangerous and determined offshoot of the terrorist network responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Related: Another CIA-Duh Crapper
Now if you will excuse me, I need to use the toilet.
In one article, the New York Times uncovered Obama’s secret “kill list,” relying in part on interviews with unnamed current and former national security advisers to the president. The story painted Obama as highly aggressive on, and personally involved in, counterterrorism decisions — a depiction that has fueled Republican speculation that the leaks are designed to bolster the president’s image as he seeks reelection against Romney.
Oh, the arrogance of the New York Times!
And if he is approving every name he is a mass-murdering war criminal, sorry.
“A really disturbing aspect of this is that one could draw the conclusion from reading these articles that it is an attempt to further the president’s political ambitions for the sake of his re-election at the expense of our national security,” Arizona Senator John McCain said on the Senate floor, after the stories were published.
Some specialists on government secrecy said it is possible that the leaked information is not accurate.
“What [the White House] can’t say is sometimes a leak is done deliberately for propaganda” overseas, said Elizabeth Bancroft, executive director of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers in McLean, Va. “You can’t discuss that in the press, but there are authorized leaks.”
Of course, when it is for overseas it is for us because in this age of worldwide media and blogs it comes back to us.
Of course, THAT WAS ALWAYS the REAL INTENTION. You like the fooley?
Romney appears to be operating under the assumption that the leaks are legitimate, calling the disclosures “a national security crisis” in his speech to the VFW.
“And it demands a full and prompt investigation by a special counsel, with explanation and consequence,” Romney added, criticizing the ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by US attorneys from Maryland and the District of Columbia, who were appointed by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
“Obama appointees, who are accountable to President Obama’s attorney general, should not be responsible for investigating the leaks coming from the Obama White House,” Romney said, suggesting investigators will withhold their findings until after the election.
Intelligence experts stressed that the leaks may not be illegal if those responsible were high-level officials in the national security or intelligence bureaucracies.
“Many senior officials have authority to declassify information,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. “Whether the decision is advisable or appropriate is a separate question.”
Meanwhile, federal law stipulates when revealing classified information is specifically unauthorized; examples include disclosing the identities of intelligence operatives, secret codes and nuclear weapons designs.
Scooter took the fall.
Also see: Welcome to My Pollard
Such a violation was at the heart of the criminal case against former Vice President Dick Cheney’s aide, I. Lewis Libby, who was convicted of four counts of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements after an investigation into who leaked the identify of Valerie Plame, a CIA officer who was married to a vocal critic of the US invasion of Iraq.
Bancroft said convictions like Libby’s are rare, that “almost all leak investigations result in nothing.”
What’s worrisome, she said, is the extent to which the issue is being politicized in the heat of a presidential campaign.
“Now we have the political cover, making it harder to tease out the truth,” she said. “They will say anything, whether it is true or not, to make the other look sneaky.”
As if that is what government and its mouthpiece were interested.
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And it is going to cost how much to enforce more tyranny and plug the leaks?
"Committee backs bill to stem security leaks, July 26, 2012
WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence committee released a general description of the measure on Wednesday but did not disclose the overall amount of spending. That number is classified. The Associated Press has reported that the budget is around $80 billion....
Yeah, that is with a BIG B in this time of austerity.
You know, maybe Nixon's plumbers would be cheaper.
Leaks about US involvement in cyberattacks on Iran and about an Al Qaeda plot to place an explosive device aboard a US-bound airliner have prompted an outcry from some in Congress and spilled into the presidential race....
The bill would restrict the number of employees in the intelligence community authorized to talk to reporters and prohibit current and former intelligence officials from doing contract work with the news media.
Whoop-ee!
Operation Mockingbird
Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?
Turns out the reporters are the intelligence community, folks. You are getting the cover story along with a big s*** fooley.
The measure, which needs the full Senate’s vote, also would require the executive branch to notify Congress when it authorizes disclosure of certain intelligence information. It would give new authority to the director of National Intelligence to proactively identify leaks and take action.
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"Romney aide suggests e-mail use violates law
WASHINGTON — One of Mitt Romney’s top advisers on Thursday morning said President Obama’s campaign manager appeared to have violated the law because he used a personal e-mail address to conduct White House business.
“On its face this appears to be a violation of the law that all official communications be preserved,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser, said on a conference call with reporters.
Remember when the Bush administration destroyed millions of e-mails? Anything ever come of that?
Jim Messina, a former White House deputy chief of staff who is now Obama’s campaign manager, sent e-mails from a private account to schedule meetings with lobbyists away from the White House in order to keep them from being detected, according to a report published Tuesday by House Republicans.
Fehrnstrom on Thursday charged that the only area where Obama has been transparent is on US national security, citing several leaks that some believe came from the White House to make Obama look strong on foreign policy.
The argument on transparency — including charges of using personal e-mail accounts — comes with a bit of irony from the Romney campaign. The Globe reported last year that Romney’s staff purchased 11 hard drives and purged state government e-mail servers in the final days of his four-year term as Massachusetts governor. E-mails were also lost from several of Romney’s Cabinet members because, they said, they weren’t told they needed to preserve them.
See: Romney Erased Mass. Records
He also destroyed records from the Salt Lake Olympics. Part of a pattern we don't need in a president.
Romney himself, and a number of his top aides, including Fehrnstrom, also used their private accounts to conduct state business when Romney was governor.
And a hypocrite, too.
In a trove of e-mails released earlier this year under a public records request, Romney used a Hotmail account to communicate with several of his top advisers. In one instance, for example, Romney sent out e-mails about emergency budget cuts using his Hotmail account.
Under Massachusetts law, records are deemed public by who the author is, not which account is being used. But since a 1997 Supreme Judicial Court ruling, governors in Massachusetts have said that the executive office is exempt from the state’s public records law.
Republicans have charged that Messina’s personal e-mails violate the Presidential Records Act.
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"Administration struggles on transparency, analysis shows"by James Ball | Washington Post, August 04, 2012
WASHINGTON — In its first year, the Obama administration vowed an increase in transparency across government, including through the Freedom of Information Act, the proactive release of documents, and the establishment of an agency to declassify 371 million pages of archived material.
Three years later, new evidence suggests that administration officials have struggled to overturn the long-standing culture of secrecy in Washington. Some of these high-profile transparency measures have stalled, and by some measures the government is keeping more secrets than before....
Didn't somebody once say something about secrecy?
The trends appear to run against the direction set out by the president in the earliest days of his government.
It is just one more reason why so many people are disappointed four years later.
On his first full day in office, Jan. 21, 2009, President Obama issued a presidential memo on freedom of information, telling agencies: “The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.”
The early results seemed promising. In 2010, response rates to FOIA requests increased and the use of exemptions to refuse requests fell. Federal departments also reduced the backlog of pending requests.
Since then, the Post analysis shows, progress has stalled and, in the case of most departments, reversed in direction....
The National Declassification Center director, Sheryl Shenberger, said one reason for the delay is funding. Spending last year on declassification across the government, excluding intelligence agencies, was $52.8 million, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, the federal agency that oversees the classification system. That was less than 1 percent of the budget for classifying material, which rose 12 percent year on year to $11.36 billion.
Yes, the truth gets millions, the lies and cover-ups get billions.
Indeed, while the declassification effort appears certain to miss its deadline, the volume of material being classified jumped 20 percent last year. The oversight office cited better record-keeping as a reason for the increases of recent years....
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So what is coming out?
"Senator Byrd’s FBI files reveal CIA leak uproar" by Lawrence Messina | Associated Press, August 05, 2012
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — US Senator Robert C. Byrd obtained secret FBI documents about the civil rights movement that were leaked by the CIA and triggered an angry confrontation between the two agencies in the 1960s, according to newly released FBI records.
Byrd, who died in June 2010 at age 92, had sought the FBI intelligence while suspecting that communists and subversives were guiding the civil rights cause, the records show. Decades before he became history’s longest-serving member of Congress, or gained the title ‘‘King of Pork’’ for sending federal funds to West Virginia, the Democrat had stalled and voted against major civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.
He also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan while a young man in the 1940s, and the FBI cited that membership while weighing his requests for classified information, the records show.
‘‘He eventually had a change of heart about a lot of that stuff,’’ said Ray Smock, a former historian for Congress who now oversees Byrd’s archives. Smock said Byrd’s hardline belief in law and order played a role in his view of the civil rights movement.
Byrd also repeatedly called his time with the hate group a serious mistake, Smock noted.
So did David Duke but he isn't cut any slack. That's not to endorse Duke; it is just to point out the layers of media you need to sift through.
The FBI released more than 750 pages from its files — many of them with words, sentences, or entire paragraphs redacted — in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated Press.
Related: Globe Gains Access to Government Secrets
Also see: The Boston Globe's Kennedy Conspiracy Theories
Ah, yes, his friend Ted.
The records date to the mid-1950s, when Byrd served in the US House. He was elected to the first of his record nine terms in the US Senate in 1958.
The documents that reveal the September 1966 leak also describe how it sparked outrage among top FBI officials and prompted an internal CIA probe that singled out two agency employees as the culprits.
The episode damaged Byrd’s standing with the bureau, though only briefly, the records show.
Numerous documents depict him as an outspoken supporter of the FBI and particularly of J. Edgar Hoover, its longtime director, even toward the end of Hoover’s tenure as criticism of him mounted.
‘‘Byrd said that the Director’s record of public service was unparalleled anywhere and he knew that it would never be possible for any successor to adequately ‘fill his shoes,’ ” one June 1966 memo between top FBI brass said.
The files repeatedly refer to Byrd’s ‘‘cordial relations’’ with the bureau, and include numerous thank-you notes and other friendly exchanges between Byrd and Hoover from the early 1960s until Hoover’s death in 1972.
And yet Hoover hated the Kennedys and helped cover-up the assassinations.
‘‘He certainly was a law and order conservative,’’ said Smock, director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University in West Virginia. ‘‘He had great respect for the Justice Department and for Hoover, as far as I know.’’
The FBI had provided Byrd only with publicly available information about three unidentified individuals involved in civil rights matters when he revealed the leaked documents to an FBI agent during a September 1966 meeting, a memo to FBI Deputy Director C.D. DeLoach said.
‘‘Why can’t a United States Senator, the best friend the FBI has in the Senate, get information directly from the FBI which he has already received from a third party,’’ Byrd was quoted as saying.
The memo said Byrd then showed the agent Xerox copies of two secret FBI investigative reports and one internal memo.
Byrd refused to reveal his source, but markings on the documents led the FBI to conclude they were copies of papers provided to the CIA earlier that year.
‘‘[It] is believed that the Director of CIA should be fully aware of this situation and if the CIA is guilty, as it appears to be, [Director Richard] Helms should be emphatically impressed with our displeasure for such uncalled-for activity,’’ the memo said.
Several of these typed memos feature handwritten notes underscoring the bureau’s anger and concern, some signed with Hoover’s initials.
‘‘This is outrageous breach of security by CIA,’’ one such note read. Helms, meanwhile, was ‘‘decidedly disturbed’’ when told of the leak, another memo said.
Helms was involved in so much nefarious shit, and I simply don't have time to get into it.
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Also see: Ryan Lochte: I Peed In London Olympic Swimming Pool
Oh, bad, bad leak!
