Dana Priest & Black Site Are A Real & Serious Leak

We just finished "leak light" with Libby and Plame with an outcome far less dramatic than the build-up. The Dems did not get what they wanted and they are falling off the cliffs right now with closed door Senate calls and request for a re-do on the 911 Hearings. Now it looks like we are about to get "Leak Heavy" and get down to some serious investigation into who in the CIA is releasing unlike in the Plame case, real and serious intelligence and damaging the US GWOT efforts:

Black Site Leak

This is a high intelligence leak that puts lots of people around the world in danger and could have very negative impacts on the efforts to protect Americans and others around the world. Per Reuters:

The CIA has asked the Justice Department to review a possible leak of classified information to The Washington Post for an article on a secret CIA global prison system, a U.S. official said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, top Republicans in Congress called for a joint House of Representatives-Senate probe on whether classified material was leaked and national security damaged. "The leak of classified information contained in the Washington Post story has been referred to the Justice Department by the CIA," said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"It's illegal to leak classified information and classified information was leaked to the Washington Post," the official said.

The story revolves around the report that we have prisons overseas that are used to hold and interrogate Al Qaeda terrorists:

The newspaper reported last week that the CIA has been holding and interrogating al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a global covert prison system established after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The WaPo story by Dana Priest that reported the leak is here:

WaPo

Per Priest's article:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

To her credit she and the Post were smart enough to hold back a bit an not publish the names of the Eastern European countries by name:

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

That I don't think will be enough to save the paper and Priest from a very serious investigation into how she got the intel, and the liability that could be shared with the CIA source that gave it to her.

The American people have pretty much shrugged off the Libby & Plame issue that was not even a leak, as something "that should not have happened but it's really not a big deal". Bets are that Libby will not be convicted at trial based on the information known at this point.

This leak or the "Heavy Black Site Leak" will have a completely different impact I think with the public. Exposing highly sensitive information that directly puts Americans and our Allies at risk, will be viewed as a very negative development. Dana Priest, the CIA and WaPo are about to become "center stage" in a "real leak investigation" and who ever is responsible for breaking laws if they were and it certainly looks like there were, are going to pay a "HUGE" price...........