The intelligence insurgency

Opinion Journal:

Fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy went on offense Monday, denying through her lawyer that she has done anything wrong. But the agency is standing by its claim that she was dismissed last week because she "knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence." It has been reported that one of her media contacts was Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the so-called "secret" prisons that the CIA allegedly used to house top level al Qaeda detainees in Eastern Europe.

We're as curious as anyone to see how Ms. McCarthy's case unfolds. But this would appear to be only the latest example of the unseemly symbiosis between elements of the press corps and a cabal of partisan bureaucrats at the CIA and elsewhere in the "intelligence community" who have been trying to undermine the Bush Presidency.

The existence of this intelligence insurgency first came to light in a major way with former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who wrote a New York Times op-ed in 2003 questioning the veracity of President Bush's "16 words" about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa. Someone close to the White House had the audacity to point out that Mr. Wilson was an anti-Bush partisan whose only claim to authority on the matter was the result of wifely nepotism. Mr. Wilson has since been thoroughly discredited, including in a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee. But former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Scooter Libby is still being prosecuted as the result of a media-instigated investigation into the "leak" of Valerie Plame's not-so-secret CIA identity.

There was also Michael Scheuer, a top counter-terrorism analyst who was allowed by the CIA to publish under "Anonymous" a scathing attack on Mr. Bush's strategy to fight terror. There were the many selective election-year leaks of prewar Iraq intelligence fed to the likes of the Times's James Risen, who also won a Pulitzer this year--for helping expose the National Security Agency's anti-al Qaeda surveillance program. And there were the post-election attacks on then-U.N. Ambassador nominee John Bolton, led by intelligence analysts who had worked with him at the State Department.

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The press is also 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.

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That does not sound like the same double standard the media was complaining about earlier this week, but it is the one that I discussed in this blog. It is interesting how blind the liberal media is to its bias and its own double standard. These guys spend too much time in their liberal bubble. They need to get out and see the real world where the conservatives are. Of course if those who violated the law to undermine our war policy are brought to justice they may be rubbing elbows with people of lesser character.