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.

Yale University has become the latest victim of a world-wide trend, fueled by resentment and leftist ideology, in which backward countries seek to regain possession of archaeological treasures removed long ago by scientists from wealthier and more advanced nations. Just as the Slavic and Turkic-descended inhabitants of modern-day Greece, seeking the return of the Parthenon’s Elgin Marbles from the British Museum, have no more real personal connection to the Greek civilization which actually produced the art than did the British Lord Elgin, who saved them from destruction; the Spanish-descended litigants from Peru have no more connection to the previous inhabitants of their country who produced the artifacts in the first place than did their discoverer, the American Hiram Bingham.

CNN reports:

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Peru is preparing a lawsuit against Yale University to retrieve artifacts taken nearly a century ago from the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, a Peruvian cultural official said Wednesday.

Peru in recent years has held discussions with Yale seeking the return of nearly 5,000 artifacts, including ceramics and human bones that explorer Hiram Bingham dug up during three expeditions to Machu Picchu in 1911, 1912 and 1914

“Yale considers the collection university property, given the amount of time it has been there,” said Luis Guillermo Lumbreras, chief of Peru’s National Institute of Culture, in an interview with The Associated Press.

Lumbreras said former President Augusto B. Leguia gave Bingham “permission to temporarily export the objects for scientific ends,” with the agreement that the artifacts would be returned after one year, and that the time frame later was extended by 18 months.

“Theoretically, they should have been returned after January 27, 1916,” Lumbreras said. “The fact is, they weren’t returned.”

For decades, Peru did not pursue the matter, he said.

“It stayed that way for nearly 100 years,” Lumbreras said. “The 100th anniversary of the scientific anniversary of Machu Picchu is coming. We believe it is time to return the collection.”

Liberals don’t want to lose the battle of ideas among the pre-school set, and have hurried to respond with their own entry in the contest to sway young opinion: Why Mommy is a Democrat, a “28-page paperback depicting the Democratic principles of fairness, tolerance, peace, and concern for the well-being of others.”

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The conservative provocation.

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Liberals are pretty unhappy about Katharine DeBrecht’s recently-published children’s book Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed.

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The democrat response.

Thomas Joscelyn discusses anonymous source spinning of information obtained by the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda operative captured in March 2002, into firm evidence of the lack of ties between the Iraqi Baathist regime and al Qaeda. Hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power-Line.

Scott Johnson at Power-Line also is investigating another even more important leak by the ( in Safire’s happy phrase) “pouting spooks” actively participating in the onging Anti-Bush Administration Intelligence Operation, describing secret CIA transports of terrorist prisoners. Richard Miniter, author of Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror and Shadow War: The Untold Story of How President Bush is Winning the War on Terror and Power-Line readers discuss whether the information of the flights was simply gleaned from public records with the addition of a little trade-craft by retired CIA officers (now part of the VIPS cabal):

(Richard Miniter says:)

It turns out that the movements of the CIA aircraft (and virtually all private aircraft) are a matter of public record. All you need is a tail number and you can usually obtain its movements for the past year.

Even without the tail number, you can pore through the records looking for suspicious movements (DC to Kabul to Baku and back, say). The CIA could ask (as can private parties as well) that its leased planes not have its logs publicly reported, but, whether through incompetence or design, they have not. Also, Grey told me, the incorporation records of Aero and other leasing outfits are publicly available. Here again the CIA was sloppy. Apparently many of the people named in those documents overlapped with people named in corporation’s documents, i.e., Joe Blow shows up as the chief executive of several different aircraft companies simultaneously and a Google search strongly suggests that Blow has a CIA connection. Add in some visits to bars frequented by charter pilots and airplane mechanics’ shops, and you have a large chunk of the story — all without a single (actively-serving) CIA leak.

Readers Rich Cox and P.S. Malloy are skeptical, and Malloy argues the fact that it may have been possible to reverse engineer the story using public information does not mean that the information leaked necessarily was obtained from public sources. There is no reason to feel certain that all participants in anti-Bush intel operations are currently retired. It is known, for instance, that CIA officers not-then-retired were leaking information intended to help discredit the aministration’s case against Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

Miniter has a later response.

Jonathan David Carson identifies the natural convergence of the interests of the American Left with those of Islamo-fascism. Even in a case featuring such apparently strong dissimilarities of ideology, what matters more is ancient truism: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And then came 9/11, and though they were too stunned to realize it at the time, for American liberals, life again had meaning, that is, an enemy of the United States to make excuses for, to protect from conservatives, and in whose image to fashion themselves. Islamofascists would try to drive American troops from the Middle East, and liberals would try to bring them home. Criticism of Islam is illegal under sharia law, and liberals would try to make it impossible here.

Terrorists would seek a repeat of 9/11, and liberals would oppose the Patriot Act. Al Qaeda would use public libraries to avoid detection by Internet sleuths, and liberals would make people crazy with fear that Bush would find out what books they were checking out. Palestinians would blow up pizza parlors, and universities would divest from companies doing business in Israel.

Iran would stone adulterers and homosexuals, and Hollywood would mock uptight Republicans. Islamic immigrants would commit honor killings, and feminists would accuse conservatives of sexism. Saudi Arabia would prohibit Christianity and Judaism, and the ACLU would drive them from public life in the United States. Insurgents would blow up American soldiers as they handed out candy to Iraqi children, and Democratic senators would liken our armed forces to Nazis and communists.

Terrorist sympathizers would concoct American and Israeli atrocities, and the world press would report them. Suicide bombers would infiltrate Iraq through Syria, and liberals would denounce the United States invasion. Muslims would brag about their ancestors, and liberals would denigrate ours. Terrorists would kill the just and the unjust alike, and professors would deconstruct the difference between right and wrong.

Islamicists would burn American flags, and liberals would scoff at flag-wavers. Muslims would claim that the Bible is made up of forgeries, and liberals would engage in Higher Criticism. Baathists would disrupt elections in Iraq, and Democrats would declare ours illegitimate. We would uncover mass graves in Iraq, and liberal Democrats would call for investigations in the United States. Muslims would drive Jews from the Middle East, and liberals would limit their numbers in the academic world with affirmative action.

Islam would spread polygamy, and liberals would undermine the institution of marriage. Zarqawi would bomb crowded mosques, and liberals would accuse conservatives of Islamophobia. Pakistani terrorists would behead Daniel Pearl, and liberals would accuse conservatives of hostility to freedom of the press. Terrorists in Iraq would behead Nicholas Berg, and his father would blame the President. Insurgents would kill Casey Sheehan, and Cindy Sheehan would accuse George Bush of murder. How sweet it is!

Carson finally proceeds to a bold, but not altogether implausible, prediction.

I predict that as the “war on terror” drags on, as it will regardless of what happens in Iraq, the left in America will come ever more to resemble foreign jihadists, to the extent even of carrying out suicide bombings and maybe even beheadings. Frustration with the failure of their message to bring about political change, combined with blind hatred of the existing order will be the trigger, just as it was for the Symbionese Liberation Army and other brutal left wing groups of a few decades earlier.