Spy Another Day: Are spooks getting purged for others' leaks?

[struggle4progress]

Inside the White House war on information

by Jarrett Murphy
October 26th, 2005 3:49 PM

The shakeup at the CIA is being painted as a crusade against agency employees who leaked secret information to the media. If so, it's another front in the wider Bush administration campaign against unauthorized disclosures of inconvenient facts.

Four CIA officials have departed since the election and others may follow. New York Times columnist William Safire last week called them "pouting spooks at Langley who bet on a Kerry victory." A memo to agency employees from new spy director Porter Goss calls on them to "scrupulously honor our secrecy oath." Newsday reports that the lancing of leakers came at White House request.

With the Bush administration tightly controlling its public message, leaks have made for juicy reading recently—and have been essential to the debate over war and peace. Last month, Knight Ridder reported on a CIA study that cast doubt on links between Saddam Hussein and terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A month earlier, the Times described a secret assessment that saw a risk of Iraq sliding into civil war. <snip>

All this takes place in an atmosphere of increased secrecy in the Bush administration. The number of documents marked "classified" increased 8 percent last year, with NASA and Health and Human Services leading the way. New employees of the Department of Homeland Security are being asked to sign an agreement not to disclose even unclassified sensitive material, although a spokeswoman says the new form just makes explicit an obligation that the department's 180,000 employees already faced. <snip>

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0447,murphy,58655,6.html

[napi21]

1. I've heard the CIA is losing a lot of agents but it doens't have

anything to do with leaking to the Press! It has everything to do this their new leader!!!! I listened to an interview today on CNN. A recently retired agent told of how Goss is destroying the agency. His ties to Shrub have convinced agents that nobody really wants the truth, they just want their opinions reinforced.

She said they have already lost a lot of well trained agents, and more are planning to go.