Its hard for a journalist to be objective on the subject of leaks, a bit like asking a lawyer if he thinks litigation is a good method for resolving disputes. People in the news business always have a bias toward more information, even on sensitive subjects involving intelligence policy. <\/p>\n
So the reader should discount for my inherent bias in favor of informing the public, and of the process that leads to disclosure namely, leaks. <\/p>\n
David Ignatius <\/p>\n
Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. <\/p>\n
Archive <\/p>\n
We are in a new debate about leaks, flowing mainly from David Sangers new book, Confront and Conceal, which is largely about the Obama administrations covert actions. (The reader should be aware of another personal bias: Sanger is a friend, even though he regularly beats the rest of us in breaking big stories.) What motivates critics is their belief that President Obamas advisers deliberately leaked secrets. <\/p>\n
Actually, its more than a belief; Sanger pretty much says it outright. In a concluding note on sources, he explains: Almost every senior member of the presidents national security team was generous enough to sit down and talk through their experiences, some more than once. Sanger says that concerning his most sensitive revelations, about Olympic Games, the code name for a U.S.-Israeli cyberwarfare assault against Iran, both American and foreign sources demanded complete anonymity. Maybe so, but in reading the book we can guess who some of the key informants may have been. <\/p>\n
Let me offer three cautionary comments not to minimize the issue of national-security leaks, but to note some realities understood by every journalist working in this area, which may not be clear to the public. <\/p>\n
My first caution is that when it comes to national-security leaks, every administration does it. Reading Sangers book (and his coverage in the New York Times) it was obvious that he learned many important secrets about cyberattacks against Iran during the George W. Bush administration, as well as during the Obama administration. <\/p>\n
Among the sensational Bush-era revelations: The cyberwar against Iran originated in 2006, when Bush complained to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley that his choices about the Iranian nuclear program were to either bomb it or accept it. I need a third option, Bush told them repeatedly. Sanger says Bush was later convinced the cyberattack would work when, after elaborate testing of mock-ups, he saw the remnants of a destroyed centrifuge. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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\nAnatomy of a leak<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"