Yesterday’s Washington Post carried a very scary front-page article, and no, I am not referring to the coverage of the Oklahoma twister. I refer to the article above the fold, left, signed by Scott Wilson and Karen deYoung entitled “Petraeus at heart of Benghazi Dispute.” The article supplies much more detail about the origins of the now infamous “talking points”, a topic I have recently mentioned twice in this space (most recently May 17, before that May 8). The article is scary for at least two reasons, which I will discuss in just a moment. But first let’s digest the gist of the news from this article.
If what you read in the newspaper can be believed—and of course it often can’t, depending on the journalists’ sources, the editors’ purposes and much else besides (of which more below)—the origins of the talking points issued from a request from chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to then-CIA Director David Petraeus to provide the minimum necessary to make sure that committee members did not inadvertently reveal classified material upon discussing the Benghazi events in committee. Petraeus did far more than the minimum necessary, the article shows, presumably to frame what had happened in Benghazi three days before in such a way that the CIA-heavy nature of the facility that was attacked, and the CIA’s own obviously inadequate responsibility for protecting that facility, would not be divulged. So we’re talking here about a standard bureaucratic exercise in posterior protection.
According to the Washington Post article, however, Petraeus’s memo “included early classified information about who might be responsible for the attack and an account of prior CIA warnings—information that put Petraeus at odds with the State Department, the FBI and senior officials within his own agency.” The article reveals that it was the CIA, in the person of Petraeus, who first asserted that the now infamous anti-Islamic video indeed played a role in sparking spontaneous demonstrations in Cairo and Benghazi that later led to the attack. This is real news (if it’s true).
The article goes on to say that, “The only government entity that did not object to the detailed talking points produced with Petraeus’s input was the White House, which played the role of mediator in the bureaucratic fight that at various points included the CIA’s top lawyer and the agency’s deputy director expressing opposition to what the director wanted.”
The article even suggests why other parties objected. The FBI objected because it worried that mention of Ansar al-Sharia might jeopardize a legal case should the perpetrators ever be apprehended and made to stand some kind of trial. The CIA’s top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, objected presumably for the same reason. The State Department objected because it did not want it known that the CIA had warned it about potential terror attacks on its facilities in North Africa, because that would make it look like the State Department had irresponsibly ignored or downplayed those warnings. This is ironic, of course, because as the Pickering investigation showed, the State Department had been irresponsible about not heeding CIA warnings, even though it was not actually a State Department building that was attacked.
Now why is this scary?
First, it’s clear from the article—and you need to read it yourself to get the full flavor—that a raft of very sensitive classified emails was leaked to theWashington Post. Good for the reporters as investigative journalists, but it’s not good when stuff this detailed ends up in the newspaper. It tends to seriously chill Interagency communications with multiple ice cubes of distrust, among other things. Note, too, that the lawyers’ concerns about mentioning Ansar al-Sharia in the memo really only make sense if they assumed that the memo would be leaked or subpoened one day—how else could it affect a prospective trial?—neither of which, as a matter of course, ought to happen.
I am not going to speculate about whose interests are served by the release of material harmful to the CIA, or even go so far as to guess out loud which part of the government would be most likely to have access in a single file to the communications of at least three different Executive Branch agencies—you yourself, dear reader, really should be able to guess by now. Don’t bother, because we know: The lead editorial in today’s New York Times, “The CIA’s Part in Benghazi”, claims that the White House released all this stuff “under pressure.” But it doesn’t say pressure from whom, why the pressure was applied, or why the White House knuckled under to it. What horsetwaddle. These kinds of leaks are very harmful cumulatively, and they need to stop. But if the White House is doing or condoning the leaking, they are very likely not to stop. That’s sort of scary, and would be scarier still were most of us not already so jaded in the face of this sort of thing.
High-level leaking carries the additional danger that it removes inhibitions against lower-level leaking. The Justice Department may indict Fox News reporter James Rosen for conspiring with a State Department expert on Korea to leak classified information, but reporters would have no reason to engage in such behavior if the middle echelons of government were not so prone to leak stuff, in many cases in the belief, not entirely unwarranted, that “everybody does it”, very much including White House staffers. Might it not be perhaps a little hypocritical for the Justice Department to focus on Rosen when the White House is dumping tons of sensitive material into the public domain? All that is scary, too.
Second, and far more important, nowhere in this article is there any indication that anyone, especially in the White House, had any objection to the CIA engaging in what can only be described as a politically sensitive drafting of language. If everyone was working under the assumption that only the House Select Committee would see the “talking points”, and that they would not be used as a basis for public statements by the State Department or the White House, than this is not a huge issue. And it could well be that Petraeus understood the matter exactly that way. But for the White House and the State Department to then use that material to speak publicly, and do so on a politically sensitive, potentially embarrassing matter just a few weeks before a presidential election, violates in every possible way the apolitical mandate of the intelligence community.
The CIA and the other parts of the intelligence community are supposed to serve up analytical judgments to their various clients; they are never supposed to get involved with either the making of political judgments or certainly with the dark arts of spinning their political effects. So let’s now go back to a sentence from the Washington Post article quoted above: “The only government entity that did not object to the detailed talking points produced with Petraeus’s input was the White House. . .”; but that’s the “government entity” that most assuredly should have objected to such talking points being used for purposes of public briefings.
With almost no exception in the torrent of commentary about Benghazigate, so-called, this point has gone unmentioned. Now, to me at least, that’s really scary. Case in point: Today’s aforementioned New York Times editorial, windy as it is, doesn’t even raise this key question, probably because, of all the actors in this drama, the White House, not the CIA, actually comes out looking worst for the wear.
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