The New York Daily News says that Prosecutor Fitzerald’s charges of making false statements against former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby may be based on the testimony of CIA officers Robert Grenier and Craig Schmall.

Grenier was CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, worked on operational plans for invading Iraq, and was recently CIA Counterterrorist Center chief.

But Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, said Grenier lost his job over his “concerns about aggressive interrogations [of terrorist detainees] at secret sites.”

Grenier is reported to have testified that Libby asked him on June 11, 2003 why the agency had sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger. And Grenier replied that Valerie Plame was “believed responsible” for arranging her husband’s trip.

Stephen Hayes thinks that Porter Goss’s resignation as CIA Director and the pending appointment of Stephen Kappes, a prominent member of William Safire’s “flock of pouting spooks” that exited Langley in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s defeat of John Kerry in November of 2004, as Deputy Director signals the Bush Administration’s defeat by liberal mandarins in the CIA establishment.

PORTER GOSS’S TENURE as director of central intelligence began with a public spat between the new reform-minded CIA leadership and an intransigent bureaucracy. Now, 18 months later, it is ending in a cloud of confusion. Goss is gone and so are his agents of change. Two of the CIA officials at the heart of that opening battle–Mary Margaret Graham and Stephen Kappes–have been promoted. And the old guard is happy.

“The move was seen as a direct repudiation of Goss’s leadership and as an olive branch to CIA veterans disaffected by his 18-month tenure,” wrote Peter Baker and Charles Babington in the Washington Post. Yet Goss had taken to the CIA the high expectations of many top Washington policymakers who work on intelligence issues.

“Porter Goss’s confirmation . . . represents perhaps the most important changing of the guard for our intelligence community since 1947,” the year the CIA was created, said Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, on the day Goss was confirmed. “He will be the first director of central intelligence in a new, and hopefully better, intelligence community.”

And now he’s gone. So what happened?…

The White House took on the Agency. And the Agency won.

The Anti-Bush Intel Community captured today’s news lead with its latest leak in USA Today. Despite all the traction the story is getting in the Blogosphere, we are clearly really just dealing with a repackaging and reissue (“old wine in new bottes”) of the same old NSA communications data-mining story originally leaked to Eric Lichtblau and James Risen in the New York Times last December.

Today’s leak goes:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews…

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

Leslie Cauley, author of the USA Today article, adds (curiously overlooking the fact that she and her employers are also breaking the law, and her name is right there at the top of the article):

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

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So, as you may well imagine, the left is, this morning, again indulging in another of its little psychodramas involving George W. Bush poring over each leftist blogger’s phone bill to see how any times he/she spoke to Aunt Tillie last month.

The Mahablog, which styles itself (tin trumpet call) as “Home blog of the American Resistance,” grabs today’s headlined leak, and runs with it, demanding indignantly:Let’s See the “Libertarian” Righties Defend This One.

Why, sure, always glad to oblige a moonbat.

The United States is at war. Foreign enemies are actively engaged in efforts to carry out attacks on civilian population centers in the United States. Enemy agents are undoubtedly resident in the United States and operating off US soil. Can the president of the United States, in such circumstances, authorize the intelligence services of the United States to intercept and open mail addressed to, or sent by, US residents, including citizens? Of course, he can. As Justice Robert Jackson remarked, “The US Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

The caterwauling of the left over the NSA’s communications data-mining activity is nothing more than narcissistic fantasy. Are there any adults on the left? You people all read like adolescent teenagers. The world revolves around little you.

In reality, no one is actually listening to your phone calls, or reading your phone bills. Some very very large computers are crunching through databases which include your phone records, my phone records, and another few hundred million phone records mechanically and indifferently, searching for various kinds of incriminating clues. If you haven’t been placing a lot of calls to suspicious numbers in Waziristan, if your favorite phone buddy is not on a list of terrorists, there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about.

Speaking frankly, guys, if they haven’t arrested Dana Priest, Lichtblau and Risen, Leslie Cauley, and most of their informants yet, there isn’t a lot of chance that anybody is coming looking for you.

Pouting Spook mouthpiece, Dana Priest in today’s Washington Post exults over Porter Goss’s departure and mourns Goss’s purge of disloyal, disaffected officers (sharing some interesting gossip that gives a revealing glimpse of the other side’s perspective):

Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq’s weapons capability.

But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials…

.” Within headquarters, “he never bonded with the workforce,” said John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July.

“Now there’s a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there’s a hemorrhaging of very good officers,” Brennan said. “Turf battles continue” with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community “because there’s a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA’s future.” Brennan added: “Porter’s a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job.”…

Goss, then the Republican chairman of the House intelligence panel, was handpicked by the White House to purge what some in the administration viewed as a cabal of wily spies working to oppose administration policy in Iraq. “He came in to clean up without knowing what he was going to clean up,” one former intelligence official said.

Goss’s counterinsurgency campaign was so crudely executed by his top lieutenants, some of them former congressional staffers, that they drove out senior and mid-level civil servants who were unwilling to accept the accusation that their actions were politically motivated, some intelligence officers and outside experts said.

“The agency was never at war with the White House,” contended Gary Berntsen, a former operations officer and self-described Republican and Bush supporter who retired in June 2005. “Eighty-five percent of them are Republicans. The CIA was a convenient scapegoat.”

Less than two months after Goss took over, the much-respected deputy director of operations, Stephen R. Kappes, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, resigned in protest over a demand by Goss’s chief of staff, Patrick Murray, that Kappes fire Sulick for criticizing Murray.

Kappes “was the guy who a generation of us wanted to see as the DDO [operations chief]. Kappes’s leaving was a painful thing,” Berntsen said. “It made it difficult for [Goss] within the clandestine service. Unfortunately, this is something that dogged him during his tenure.”

The confrontation between Murray and the agency’s senior leadership continued throughout Goss’s tenure, exacerbated by the fact that Goss effectively allowed Murray and other close aides to run the agency, in the view of some current and former intelligence officials. Many agency officials felt the aides showed disdain for officers who had spent their careers in public service.

Four former deputy directors of operations once tried to offer Goss advice about changing the clandestine service without setting off a rebellion, but Goss declined to speak to any of them, said former CIA officials who are aware of the communications. The perception that Goss was conducting a partisan witch hunt grew, too, as staffers asked about the party affiliation of officers who sent in cables or analyses on Iraq that contradicted the Defense Department’s more optimistic scenarios.

“Unfortunately, Goss is going to be seen as the guy who oversaw the agency victimized by politics,” said Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the European division. “His tenure saw the greatest loss of operational experience” in the operations division since congressional hearings on CIA domestic spying plunged the agency into crisis, he said.

Though the agency has grown considerably in size and budget in the past four years — the operations branch has reportedly grown in size by nearly 30 percent — dozens of officers with more than a decade of field experience each, those who would have been tapped as new staff chiefs or division heads, chose to leave.

Read from the opposite viewpoint from that of the Santa Cruz graduate I like to think of as: “Will-no-one-rid-me-of-this-turbulent?” Priest, it all sounds like awfully good news. Goss’s tenure may not have been long enough to settle Intelligence agency rivalries and turf wars, or to make the Agency as effective as it should be, but apparently Porter Goss did much toward accomplishing the absolutely necessary first step of cleaning out the self-important Mandarins pretending to a right to over-rule the policies of the elected government, along with the Peaceniks who somehow accidently wandered into the CIA’s Langley headquarters thinking they had arrived at Woodstock.

So the evening’s toast is: Hurrah for Porter Goss, and confusion (and long prison sentences) to Pouting Spooks and VIP-ers.

On April 26th, the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial titled Our Rotten IntelligenCIA:

The press is… inventing a preposterous double standard that is supposed to help us all distinguish between bad leaks (the Plame name) and virtuous leaks (whatever Ms. McCarthy might have done). Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie has put himself on record as saying Ms. McCarthy should not “come to harm” for helping citizens hold their government accountable. Of the Plame affair, by contrast, the Post’s editorial page said her exposure may have been an “egregious abuse of the public trust.”

It would appear that the only relevant difference here is whose political ox is being gored, and whether a liberal or conservative journalist was the beneficiary of the leak. That the press sought to hound Robert Novak out of polite society for the Plame disclosure and then rewards Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen with Pulitzers proves the worst that any critic has ever said about media bias.

The deepest damage from these leak frenzies may yet be to the press itself, both in credibility and its ability to do its job. It was the press that unleashed anti-leak search missions aimed at the White House that have seen Judith Miller jailed and may find Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen facing subpoenas. And it was the press that promoted the probe under the rarely used Espionage Act of “neocon” Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin, only to find that the same law may now be used against its own “whistleblower” sources. Just recently has the press begun to notice that the use of the same Espionage Act to prosecute two pro-Israel lobbyists for repeating classified information isn’t much different from prosecuting someone for what the press does every day — except for a far larger audience.

We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job. But then that’s part of the reason we didn’t join Joe Wilson and the New York Times in demanding Karl Rove’s head over the Plame disclosure. As for some of our media colleagues, when they stop being honest chroniclers of events and start getting into bed with bureaucrats looking to take down elected political leaders, they shouldn’t be surprised if those leaders treat them like the partisans they have become.

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Stung by the Journal’s criticism, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responded in a Letter to the Editor today, denying any partisan bias, by noting that the Times even covers major scandals involving democrats “(Ask Bill Clinton. Ask Congressman Mollohan)” (!):

In the case of the eavesdropping story, President Bush and other figures in his administration were given abundant opportunities to explain why they felt our information should not be published. We considered the evidence presented to us, agonized over it, delayed publication because of it. In the end, their case did not stand up to the evidence our reporters amassed, and we judged that the responsible course was to publish what we knew and let readers assess it themselves. You are welcome to question that judgment, but you have presented no basis for challenging it, let alone for attributing it to bad faith or animus toward the president.

In the final paragraph of your broadside, you include the following disclaimer: “We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job.” That’s nice to hear, and squares with what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set out to protect a vibrant, inquisitive press. It’s just hard to square with the rest of your editorial.

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If the Times editorial policy is so non-partisan, responsible, and generally sans reproche as all that, I’d be curious to know why Mr. Keller found it necessary to stonewall, and refuse to answer, the timid and polite inquiries by his own pet lapdog “ombudsman” Byrom Calame, who noted that remarkable silence at the beginning of this year.

Who does the Times think it’s kidding?

From Walter Duranty’s award-winning concealment of the horrors of Stalinist collectivization, to Herbert Matthews’ press agentry for Fidel Castro, to the studiously overlooked coverage of the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia, the Times has compiled, for nearly a century, a record of leftwing partisan mendacity that rivals Pravda’s.

Jed Babbin wonders whether, seen in the light of the anti-Bush Intelligence Operations, today’s CIA has not come to resemble the Praetorians of Ancient Rome:

Rome’s Praetorian Guards began as a small elite imperial guard that grew into a force unto themselves. Independent of the army and the Senate they were the emperor’s own, and utterly loyal to him. Until they were not. Over three centuries, as their wealth and power increased, the scope of their loyalty shrank so that they were not even loyal among themselves. Their end came when they scrupled at nothing. They murdered emperors and anointed imperial successors and were finally disbanded for disloyalty.

The left’s big story of the day was reported by The Raw Story:

On Chris Matthews’ Hardball Monday evening, just moments ago, MSNBC correspondent David Shuster confirmed what RAW STORY first reported in February: that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was working on Iran at the time she was outed.

RAW STORY’s Larisa Alexandrovna broke the story earlier this year, which went unnoticed by the mainstream media (Read our full story).

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Reports Shuster in this rush transcript: “INTELLIGENCE SOURCES SAY VALERIE WILSON WAS PART OF AN OPERATION THREE YEARS AGO TRACKING THE PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS MATERIAL INTO IRAN. AND THE SOURCES ALLEGE THAT WHEN MRS. WILSON’S COVER WAS BLOWN, THE ADMINISTRATION’S ABILITY TO TRACK IRAN’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS WAS DAMAGED AS WELL.

My goodness! That sounds terrible.

The problem is this report seems to be conflating Valerie Plame’s working as a Non-Official Cover (NOC) agent, as we discussed ourselves previously here, in Europe pre-1997, with her later domestic employment at CIA’s Directorate of Operations (DO) Counterproliferation Division (CPD), mentioned here.

It doesn’t seem plausible that Valerie Plame could have working under non-official cover domestically within the CIA itself, does it?

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Larry Johnson, whose word I’d be reluctant to take that water is wet, asserted back in 2005:

Then there is the claim that the law to protect intelligence identities could not have been violated because Valerie Wilson had not lived overseas for six years. Too bad this is not what the law stipulates. The law actually requires that a covered person “served” overseas in the last five years. Served does not mean lived. In the case of Valerie Wilson, energy consultant for Brewster-Jennings, she traveled overseas in 2003, 2002, and 2001, as part of her cover job. She met with folks who worked in the nuclear industry, cultivated sources, and managed spies. She was a national security asset until exposed by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

How exactly does democrat party partisan Larry Johnson (who left the CIA in 1989, and the State Department in 1993) know that? If he really knew any of this to be true, Fitzgerald could be indicting somebody for leaking to him.

If Valerie Plame merely went overseas to the Non-Proliferation Studies Convention in 2002, I’m afraid, Mr. Fitzgerald will have a very hard time persuading anyone who is not an anti-Bush partisan that such a junket rises to the level referred to in the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Mr Fitzgerald ought to put his cards on the table already, and quit leaving this legally key issue open to gossip and wild-eyed speculation.

Dana Priest, Washington Post reporter and favorite confidante of Mary O. McCarthy and other Pouting Spooks, participated in an on-line discussion Thursday on the topic of National Security. Ms. Priest was asked:

Indianapolis, Ind.: Bill Bennett told Wolf Blitzer the other day that you should be arrested for your story about secret prisons. Wolf asked Howard Kurtz to respond. Howie looked a little stunned at first and then came strongly to your defense. How do you respond to people that are saying you should be arrested?

Dana Priest: Well, first, Bennett either doesn’t understand the law or is purposefully distorting it. He keeps saying that it is illegal to publish secrets. It is not. There is a category of secrets that is illegal to publish–names of covert operatives, certain signal intelligence and nuclear secrets–but even with these, prosecution is possible only under certain circumstances. Beyond that though, he seems to be of the camp that the government and only the government should decide what the public should know in the area of national security. In this sense, his views run contrary to the framers of the Constitution who believed a free press was essential to maintaining not just a democracy, but a strong, vibrant democracy in which major policy is questions are debated in the open.

There you have it.

There are dogmatists, like Bill Bennett, who think only the elected government should decided what is classified information, and which disclosures could be harmful to National Security. And there are more latitudinarian thinkers, like Ms. Priest, who believe disclosing Intelligence secrets in America is kind of like going to Communion in the Anglican Church: none must, some should, all may.

It looked suspicious to me this morning when I read Rick Moran‘s explanation of just who is representing Mary O. McCarthy. The mere presence of that particular counsel suggested strong ties to the strategic and financial wellsprings of the democratic left.

We had already seen Larry Johnson, Rand Beers, and Larry Wilkerson rush to McCarthy’s defense. And now here comes no less than Ray McGovern himself, chief spokesman of VIPs, the public face of the Anti-Bush Intel Operation, defending her on PBS.

video

The ever-expanding roster of Pouting Spooks appearing out of the woodwork to defend La McCarthy’s God-given Constitutional right to register personal dissent from White House policies by dispensing National Security secrets to the Press would appear further to hint darkly about the lady’s personal and professional associations and ties.

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Hat tip to AJStrata

Hot Air has assembled a very handy primer of background information.

If she’s innocent, it seems a curious coincidence that she’s got such a high-powered democrat party defense attorney defending her.

H/T to Michelle Malkin.

Washington Post reports that Mrs. McCarthy’s not guilty, and you can’t prosecute her successfully either, if she is.

A lawyer representing fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy said yesterday that his client did not leak any classified information and did not disclose to Washington Post reporter Dana Priest the existence of secret CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected terrorists.

The statement by Ty Cobb, a lawyer in the Washington office of Hogan & Hartson who said he was speaking for McCarthy, came on the same day that a senior intelligence official said the agency is not asserting that McCarthy was a key source of Priest’s award-winning articles last year disclosing the agency’s secret prisons.

McCarthy was fired because the CIA concluded that she had undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Priest, in violation of a security agreement. That does not mean she revealed the existence of the prisons to Priest, Cobb said.

Cobb said that McCarthy, who worked in the CIA inspector general’s office, “did not have access to the information she is accused of leaking,” namely the classified information about any secret detention centers in Europe. Having unreported media contacts is not unheard of at the CIA but is a violation of the agency’s rules…

..Though McCarthy acknowledged having contact with reporters, a senior intelligence official confirmed yesterday that she is not believed to have played a central role in The Post’s reporting on the secret prisons. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing personnel matters…

..Where Cobb’s account and the CIA’s account differed yesterday is on whether McCarthy discussed any classified information with journalists. Intelligence sources said that the inspector general’s office was generally aware of a secret prison program but that McCarthy did not have access to specifics, such as prison locations…

..Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University, said he does not think the Post article includes the kind of operational details that a prosecutor would need to build a case.

“It’s the fact of the thing that they’re trying to keep secret, not to protect sources and methods, but to hide something controversial,” he said. “That seems like a hard prosecution to me.”

Kate Martin, executive director of the Center for National Security Studies, said that “even if the espionage statutes were read to apply to leaks of information, we would say the First Amendment prohibits criminalizing leaks of information which reveal wrongful or illegal activities by the government.”

And the New York Times unlimbers its Ouija Board and channels a warning from a Pouting Spook.

A criminal trial would be devastating for Langley,” said one former C.I.A. officer, referring to the agency’s Virginia headquarters. He spoke about a possible prosecution on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

Well, they’ve double-dared Porter Goss and the Administration to try to do anything about the Press leaks and the Anti-Bush Intel Operation. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.

Robin has compiled a link collection, which may be helpful for those trying to connect the dots.