"On a scale of one to ten, if Mary McCarthy did what she is accused of doing, it would be at best a six or seven," said one former senior intelligence official, whose position required involvement in numerous leak investigations. "What Pat Roberts did, from a legal and national security point of view, was an eleven."
I'm struggling a bit here. Roberts tells a group of newspaper editors the day after a military strike on a specific target meant to take out Saddam Hussein that human intelligence was involved, in person, on the record. This is worse than McCarthy leaking classified information, not common sense information, behind the protection of a journalist, never actually revealing herself. Yeah, I guess I could see how those are similar ...
If I was a crazy person, that is. Go with it Waas:
By contrast, the circumstances involving Roberts' statements three years ago to the newspaper group were never subjected to official scrutiny. The senator's comments, while highly significant, received almost no press attention at the time.
Highly significant because ... you want it to be? This reminds me of when John Kerry unmasked an intelligence official in some sort of hearing a few years back. Did anyone care? No, not really. Certainly not the media or Waas. At least the Washington Post reported Roberts' comments the day after he made them. The reason why nobody cared was because the information Roberts came ou with was not of any importance, but after three years it will be much easier for Waas to play with our memories, especially with the help of his trusty anonymous sources:
At the time, it was one of the most sensitive secrets in government that the CIA had recruited Iraqi nationals who claimed to have infiltrated Hussein's inner circle to be able to follow his movements at the onset of war. But after the bombs and missiles hit an Iraqi governmental complex known as Dora Park, located on the Tigris River south of Baghdad, Hussein either was not there, or escaped unharmed.
Whether or not Roberts' comments were inadvertent, former intelligence officials said, they almost certainly tipped off the Iraqi dictator that there were spies close to him. "He [Roberts] had given up that we had a penetration of [Saddam's] inner circle," says a former senior intelligence official. "It was the worst thing you could ever do."
Aside from eating babies, I suppose. Seriously though, Waas gives up the game right here. Now we find out that these human intelligence sources "claimed" to have infiltrated Hussein's inner-circle. Obviously they were lying, because Saddam and his sons were never struck by any of the bombing campaigns.
What repercussions, if any, occurred in Baghdad as a result of Roberts' comments could not be determined, according to sources. After the missile and bombing attack on his bunker, it is possible that Hussein suspected that he had a spy or spies within his entourage, intelligence officials said. One former official said that the Iraqi dictator "very well may have thought he had been located because of electronic monitoring." Two former intelligence officials said the disclosure by Roberts may have made it more difficult to launch a second missile or bombing attack against Saddam Hussein in the early days of the war.
