As spies go, he's no Wen Ho Lee...
There are 5 dozen fun things I want to write about this evening but couldn’t find the energy to type – then this NYT story woke up my lazy fingers:
Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials.
Dear old Ahmad, sometimes dear old Ahmed, still always pronounced “Ock-med,” like you were getting ready to spit but changed your mind. The news that he was spying for Iran (#2, with a bullet, on the Axis Of Evil™) while simultaneously duping senior administration officials (usually simply legendary for their ability to anonymously “say” in junk journalism – see above) about Iraqi WMD and shadowy al-Qaeda connections, is old news by now, ready to become a Jeopardy answer.
But what he actually betrayed to those second-rate evildoers in Iran has now been outed – he told them that the US had the numbers on their secret decoder rings and was able to decipher their transmissions even faster than they could. No big deal – not a lot of propaganda energy has been expended to create a “new Hitler” in Iran, so nobody will make any analogies to the Enigma Machine.
Business as usual, in other words, but what bothers me is that the NYT had this story at the time of the Chalabi raids and acquiesced to administration requests to suppress it. Yeah, war is hell, especially for the First Amendment, but this request follows a disturbing pattern: The revelations are not so much harmful to the war effort itself as they are revealing of the administration’s incompetence (yes, The “I” word). Like the Abu Ghraib story at CBS, it reveals an attempt not so much to preserve national security as to preserve the illusion of competence. Worse, the government withdrew the request only when it became apparent that the story was too big to contain:
The Bush administration, citing national security concerns, asked The New York Times and other news organizations not to publish details of the case. The Times agreed to hold off publication of some specific information that top intelligence officials said would compromise a vital, continuing intelligence operation. The administration withdrew its request on Tuesday, saying information about the code-breaking was starting to appear in news accounts.
This is what you might expect of an inept government in an election year, so no big deal there. The disturbing part is that the Gray Lady continues to be a slut, despite all the boilerplate mea culpas over Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and Howell Raines. The whole point of a free press is to prevent government abuses of power by insuring that their actions are transparent to the public, not to become part of a propaganda machine that enshrines their myths until after all the major mistakes have been made.
1:47:03 AM 
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