Special Prosecutors Need Not Apply

I spent my first decade in journalism at Aviation Week & Space Technology, known especially in those 1980's Cold-War days as Aviation Leak. So let's just say I am not culturally opposed to stories based on classified information. Still, after reading Dana Priest today, CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons, I'm searching for a calculator to tally how many years would be served in a federal penitentiary by any of her sources.

The leaks obviously beg for comparison with Plamegate, in which Lewis Libby has been indicted for allegedly lying to a grand jury about how he learned about the status of a CIA employee who apparently didn't even retain her super-duper cover when Libby and others were talking about her.

Here we have intelligence sources spilling the beans on a black prison program so secretive that, according to Priest,

...the White House has refused to allow the CIA to brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen on the program's generalities.

Well, I guess no one ever said life in Washington was fair. And let's not think for a moment that Priest and her editors are unconcerned about the potential for damage here in the war against terrorism. After all:

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

Gee, thanks. That's a really effective Cone of Silence right there.

Look, there are important issues here and I'm ambivalent about stories like this--I don't want any authority torturing anyone. But just once, I'd like to see an anonymous source properly described. Here, most of the time Priest cites "intelligence officials," she should say "who oppose the secret prison program and hope to destroy it by leaking classified information."  That would be more direct--more honest--than the vague constructions she uses: Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers... considerable concern lingers about [its] legality, morality and practicality....

Loved this graf too:

Among the first steps was to figure out where the CIA could secretly hold the captives. One early idea was to keep them on ships in international waters, but that was discarded for security and logistics reasons.

CIA officers also searched for a setting like Alcatraz Island. They considered the virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia, which were edged with craggy cliffs and covered in woods. But poor sanitary conditions could easily lead to fatal diseases, they decided, and besides, they wondered, could the Zambians be trusted with such a secret?

Could the Americans?