Goss Launches Leak Probe

We’ve been writing for a couple of years now about the CIA’s covert war against the Bush administration. We now have a CIA Director, Porter Goss, who is determined to shut off the flow of illegal leaks. ABC News reports:

The director of the CIA has launched a major internal probe into media leaks about covert operations. In an agencywide e-mail, Porter Goss blamed “a very small number of people” for leaks about secret CIA operations that, in his words, “do damage to the credibility of the agency.”
According to people familiar with the Goss e-mail, sent in late January and classified secret, the CIA director warned that any CIA officer deemed suspect by the agency’s Office of Security and its Counter Intelligence Center (which handles internal affairs) could be subjected to an unscheduled lie detector test.
Goss told CIA employees there were ways other than talking to the news media to resolve any issues they had with classified CIA operations.
The memo informs its recipients that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to prosecute any leakers within its ranks. This comes in connection with recent news reports that detailed the CIA’s operation of secret prisons in Europe and its far-flung flights of suspected terrorists to foreign prisons.

That’s great–someone needs to go to jail. I can’t help noticing, though, that we have here a leak about a classified memo about cracking down on leaks. The CIA has a ways to go to restore its credibility.

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