Mona Charen at TownHall is urging that Congressional oversight committees get to work. She’s perfectly right. There is at least a nominally Republican majority in Congress. The Intelligence Community cabal of doves has successfully gotten a major investigation of its own going on the most slender of pretexts. Why doesn’t this administration start using its congressional allies to defend itself and the national interest instead of standing there like a deer in the headlights? Hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power-Line.

The Dec. 1 edition of The New York Times carried a story about the damage done to U.S. interests by the revelation that the CIA maintains a number of secret interrogation prisons for terrorists in Europe and elsewhere. (“Reports of Secret U.S. Prisons in Europe Draw Ire and Otherwise Red Faces.”) Governments throughout the continent are now demanding explanations from the U.S. Department of State and otherwise strutting their outrage that the U.S. might be kidnapping suspected terrorists from European soil and transferring them to other nations.

How did this bit of classified information become public? It was a leak from within the CIA (to The Washington Post in that case) — and a breathtaking one at that. Though the agency has been steadily leaking damaging stories about the Bush administration since 9/11, it has now crossed a new threshold with a leak that severely damages CIA activities and arguably harms national security — all for the sake of crippling George W. Bush.