Amato on Good Leaks and Bad Leaks

John Amato at Crooks and Liars has a very compelling question: why isn't the administration and the conservative blogosphere and media attacking the NY Daily News for reporting leaked information on an ongoing investigation about the alleged subway bombers in New York? Here's the original report:

The FBI has uncovered what officials consider a serious plot by jihadists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in hopes of causing a torrent of water to deluge lower Manhattan, the Daily News has learned.

The News has learned that at the request of U.S. officials, authorities in Beirut arrested one of the alleged conspirators, identified as Amir Andalousli, in recent months. Agents were scrambling yesterday to try to nab other suspects, sources said. They didn't indicate how many people were the target of the international dragnet but said they were scattered all over the world. "This is an ongoing operation," one source said.

This immediately was spread all over the news media. So where are all those folks attacking the New York Times for leaking information about ongoing investigations? Dead silent, every one of them. No STACLU calling for the editors of the Daily News to be imprisoned, no hyperbolic radio talk show hosts fantasizing about the death penalty for the reporters or publishers. Not a word, so far as I can tell, even hinting at any impropriety.

And what is the sole difference between that and the Times' leak of the NSA program? This one makes the administration look good, the other one made the administration look bad. That's it. No one can seriously suggest that it's not disruptive to an investigation involving multiple people to announce that one of them has been arrested in Beirut. Surely that will send the others involved in the plot underground and make them harder to catch, not easier (that's why the government doesn't announce when they've caught someone immediately because they need to get any information they have before that person's co-plotters know they have it).

The real difference here is not hard to discern: the White House leaked this information on purpose. When they leak information on purpose for some political goal (it makes them look good to be continually arresting the bad guys), that's good; when someone else links information that makes them look bad, that's treason. That's why the right wing media has been defending the administration on the Valerie Plame leak and that's why they dutifully went after the Times over a leak they didn't like but cheer on leaks that the administration does themselves.

Can you imagine the reaction of the right wing if, say, the Clinton administration had leaked the identity of a CIA operative and destroyed an ongoing operation in counter-proliferation in order to settle a score with a political enemy? Can you imagine if court documents showed that this decision came straight from Al Gore's office? There would be impeachment hearings and treason charges (and it goes without saying that the Democrats would also flip flop on the issue; they'd be defending Clinton for doing the same thing they're blasting Bush for). All of this is pure political hypocrisy based on partisan convenience. That's why I don't take the outrage of either side seriously.

Update: Glen Greenwald points to this article, wherein an FBI spokesman says that the leak clearly did compromise the FBI's relationship with foreign intelligence services with whom they were cooperating on the matter:

Disclosure of the bomb plot coincided with the one-year anniversary of a terrorist bomb attack on London subways and a bus that killed 52 and injured about 700. Authorities said they hadn't intended to release details about the plot this early and that whoever leaked the information had compromised the FBI's relationship with some foreign intelligence services.

The person who leaked the details is clearly someone who doesn't understand the fragility of international relations,'' Mershon said. "We've had a number of uncomfortable questions and some upsetment (sic) with these foreign intelligence services that had been working with us on a daily basis.''

All of this just makes the silence from the right that more hypocritical and inconsistent. The truth is that they just repeat the talking points of the administration. As long as the administration doesn't complain about the leak - because they almost certainly leaked it on purpose - then they won't either - and the reality be damned.