Fixing Leaks

Republicans want to track down congressional leak story   Wow, Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist mean business about those pesky leaks that endanger American security at home and abroad.  It seems that they’re convinced that some source within Congress leaked the fact that the U.S. has maintained secret prisons in other countries for detaining and questioning terrorists.  Now, our national capacity to torture prisoners and ignore the formalities of charging them, letting anyone know that they’re being held, etc. is in jeopardy.  The president reasons that “We don’t torture, because torture is against the law and we determine what the law is.”

These guys sure didn’t seem all that concerned about leaks when Scooter Libby was covering them up to protect the Big WMD lie by exposing a CIA operative.  Was it Donald Rumsfeld who responded to Abu Ghraib by banning the use of camera phones in US prison facilities?  Was it Hastert who was accused in Vanity Fair by Sibel Edmonds of suppressing wiretaps of Turks saying that he had accepted bribes to suppress a Congressional resolution about the Armenia genocide?  Was it Frist who’s under investigation for insider trading and how does one insider trade without a leak?  They sure didn’t seem as concerned when it was revealed that a Republican staffer had hacked Democratic e-mails or when Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton kept springing leaks.

I’m personally less worried about the leaks than what those leaks reveal about what’s still sealed.