Take a long hard look at that wall of stars-None of us will know how many were added because of this

[ribrepin]

Imagine that one day you wake up to the incessent ping of your beeper. It is still dark outside your window, and you slide out of bed, pad quietly down the hallway and try not to wake up the wife and kids, as you slip into your home office and place a call on a secure phone. You are told that your cover has been blown, that your family may be at risk. You have to make instant decisions for your own safety, that of your family, and of every asset you have in the field - and to do that, you have to prioritize which assets are more valuable and which you can afford to lose, if necessary. You have to decide then and there which of the people you cultivated, the ones you promised safety in exchange for information and cooperation, which of them may have to die because you may not have time to save them all.

Why has your cover been blown? Because you work as a CIA colleague of the wife of a man who dared to question the veracity of the President of the United States on a matter of national security, a matter of an exaggerated claim that was inserted in his State of the Union address to bolster his case for war in Iraq. And the President's cronies and hatchet men decided to out this man's wife for political payback, as a lesson to anyone else who would dare to question their decisions and as a means to staunch the bleeding from this initial salvo of criticism. Damn the consequences.

No consideration for all the lives interconnected in this network of agents and field assets, or the years it took to cultivate them. No thought of the impact that this betrayal by highly placed governmental officials would have down the line -- how hard it would make it to recruit human intelligence assets in the field at the very time that we need them most to gather information inside the terrorist networks that threaten us more and more each day.

No concern for the years of set up it took for Brewster-Jennings and Company, the cover company set up by the CIA that both you and this man's wife used, to get up and running. The fact that you and she worked along with a number of other highly trained CIA officers around the world -- trained in tracking down the weapons used by terrorists and thugs and the very people that threaten our nation's safety every single day wasn't important to them. Nor was the loss of the millions of taxpayer dollars it took to set this up and maintain it as viable cover in a number of countries worldwide.


http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2005/10/why-this-matters.html

It's from 2005 but it's just as relevant today as then.

[ribrepin]

1. Kicking my own thread

This is a good read about the possible damage done by the CIA leak. It infuriates me when the Bushies try to say there was no damage Just the outing of Brewster Jennings caused untold damage.