What Was Once Patriotic Is Now Suddenly Considered Treason!

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

What Was Once Patriotic Is Now Suddenly Considered Treason!

During the Bush administration, leaks out of the Pentagon, State Department, and CIA that would undermine national security were routinely praised by the Democrats and mainstream media as patriotic.

Now that leaks are coming out showing just how inept Barack Obama’s foreign policy dithering has become, leakers must be shut down. The administration is insisting that the Pentagon do something about all the meddlesome leaks that show the behind the scenes indecisiveness rapidly becoming the hallmark of this administration’s foreign policy.

"These damaging leaks have to be stopped! It is tantamount to treason", said Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Seems like the shoe is on the other foot now.


Administration Plans to Punish Leakers......

The Obama administration is increasingly exasperated by leaks of national-security-related information and is planning a major effort to root out and punish those responsible, top officials said Thursday.


Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he is “appalled” by a series of leaks surrounding the president’s deliberations about the way forward in Afghanistan and the investigation into last week’s massacre at Fort Hood, Texas.


“It does not serve the country, and it does not serve the military,” Gates told reporters as he traveled to Wisconsin to visit a factory that makes military vehicles. “If I found out with high confidence anybody who was leaking in the department, … it would probably be a career-ender.”


Gates’s comments came as top administration lawyers disclosed that the National Counterintelligence Executive, Robert Bear Bryant, has been instructed to come up with a new strategy for stemming the leaks.


“Leaks: They really do confound me,” Pentagon general counsel Jed Johnson told lawyers at an American Bar Association conference Thursday morning. “I’ve now lived in this administration long enough to see it happen to things that I was personally involved in, that all of a sudden show up in the newspaper the next day or on TV the very day I was involved in the discussion of it.”


The administration has faced numerous leaks in the run up to Obama’s decision on the way ahead in Afghanistan — from the time that Gen. Stanley McChrystal issued his assessment of the fight there up until yesterday, to the internal deliberations over how many troops to add and what strategy options are being considered to Wednesday — when memos from Karl Eikenberry, the ambassador to Afghanistan were leaked. Those memos urged caution about increasing troop levels, given continued political corruption in Afghanistan, according to news reports.


Asked specifically about the leaks of Eikenberry’s cables, Gates declined to comment.


Johnson suggested that some recent leaks were attributable to information given to journalists who claimed to be working on long-term book projects.


“There is the sort of inadvertent leak where somebody was assured by the reporter, ‘Oh, it’s only going to go in my book two years from now,’ and you give the reporter something really interesting and juicy that he just feels compelled to put in the newspaper the next day,” Johnson said.


Some took Johnson’s comment about information obtained by a journalist working on a book project to be a reference to Washington Post editor Bob Woodward and his story in September disclosing a leaked copy of McChrystal’s Afghanistan assessment.


However, Woodward told POLITICO there was no misunderstanding between him and his sources. “As I have said before, I had permission and agreement from the sources that the assessment could be reported at once in the Post,” the veteran journalist said in an e-mail message.


Leaking is a time-honored tactic for policymakers in Washington and major national-security debates have often involved such tactics.


Leak investigations are also nothing new, and investigations of such leaks have sometimes been dropped when evidence points to officials who might have had authority to declassify the information.



Thanks to Preston Miller, for sharing the above content.