Now tell the truth

Are you really surprised by this?

[T]op Republicans in Congress called for a joint House of Representatives-Senate probe on whether classified material was leaked and national security damaged,

Reuters reported on Tuesday. The call was prompted by a Washington Post story last week laying out that

[t]he CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents. ...

Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

According to Reuters,

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois in a letter asked the intelligence committees to determine if the information given to the newspaper was classified and accurate, who leaked it and under what authority, and the actual and potential national security damage from it.

These are the very same people who tried to block an investigation into 9/11, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into even a tepid whitewash investigation of prewar intelligence, who even now are stalling on their own promised investigation of the use of that intelligence by the Shrub gang (the so-called "Phase II"), and who couldn't have cared less about the outing of Valerie Plame. The very same people who seem to be utterly uncurious as to how it came to be that the US and UK intelligence services both were supposedly fooled by an obvious, clumsy, forgery into claiming "credible" evidence that Saddam Hussein had tried to get yellowcake from Niger. The very same people who apparently are totally uninterested in the fact that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi,

[a] high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.

The same people. The same people who are now all hot and heavy to discover just who did the dastardly deed of telling the truth about the US government disappearing people into a secret prison system. Like I said, are you surprised?

Asked whether the Republican leaders would seek an investigation of the secret prisons, Ron Bonjean, Hastert's spokesman, said, "First we're looking into why we have people leaking classified information."

Ah. I guess investigating the prisons will be Phase II.

Footnote: The link to the Niger documents came by way of Left End of the Dial.

Another Footnote: Someday I should lay out in detail my feelings about the Valerie Plame case. 'Cause, ya see, I'm not particularly upset by the outing of an agent per se. It would depend more on what they had been doing and who they were doing it with. Most of what the CIA does is intelligence-gathering and analysis, and much of that doesn't even involve what would usually be considered spying but rather combing through open-source material. It's that minority of the agency's work that involves covert action, of actually trying to manipulate events and people, which I reject.

The secret prison system described by the Post certainly fits in that latter category. The person who leaked that information should not be hunted, they should be celebrated as a hero.

Footnote to the Footnote: Frist and Hastert's probe may get short-circuited before it begins. According to Raw Story,

Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) told CNN's Ed Henry Tuesday afternoon that he believed it was a Republican senator who gave information about secret CIA jails abroad to the Washington Post....

Lott said that much of the information contained in the Post report ... was discussed at a meeting of Republican senators last Tuesday.

So let's see how quickly Billy and Denny backtrack. Five... Four... Three...