Judging the Damage From Obama's Leaks

by JED BABBIN June 11, 2012

The flood of classified information coming out of the Obama White House has grown so large -- and the leaks so important -- that last week there was a bipartisan call for an investigation into the White House's apparent involvement. If it leads to the right kind of investigation, it may be enough to reverse the leaks' intended political effect of boosting the president's chances of reelection.

Last Thursday's call for an investigation into the leaks, made by both chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence, was unprecedented. It must have resulted from the four members' judgment that the leaks have seriously damaged our national security and the ability of our intelligence community to do its job.

The Intelligence Committee leaders' action raised the political heat on the president to such a degree that Attorney General Eric Holder appointed two U.S. attorneys, one from Maryland and one from Washington , D.C., to oversee special investigations by the FBI that were already under way.

But these investigations will drag on and their results won't be known for years. Calls for congressional hearings at which possible leakers and senior White House figures would be called to account continue, but any open hearings would fail over claims that classified information couldn't be disclosed. Questions that demanded details of the administration's internal debates would be blocked by claims of executive privilege. Some pundits, undeterred by history, have called for a revival of the "independent counsel" process of unfond memory.

There is a better process that would produce results sooner than November, and could -- if seized upon by Gov. Romney as leader of the Republican Party -- have the right kind of political effect before the election.

The focus of the leak problem should not only be the questions of who leaked the information and what role the president played in the disclosures. The focus has to be the assessment of how much damage -- and what kinds of damage --the leaks did to our national security.

Every leaker has an agenda. More often than not, and quite evidently in these cases, the agenda is a political one. But for the Republicans to have any impact on the campaign -- and the desired effect of ending the leak campaign -- they have to begin with substance, not politics.

A CNN story attempted to frame the debate on the leaks politically to the exclusion of substance. It quoted Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, who said, "There's a difference between a clean, meaningful leak and a sloppy one that has unintended consequences."

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Brinkley's distinction is drawn solely around the political effects and ignores the real issue. The only difference with which we should be concerned is between a leak that causes no damage to national security and one that does.

That difference is illustrated by the difference between the leak of the CIA employment of Valerie Plame and the string of leaks by the Obama administration -- evidently done with presidential approval -- of the president's "kill list" program and our now-disclosed cyberattack on Iran using the Stuxnet computer worm.

When a significant secret is leaked, the CIA or the Defense Department -- or both -- do what's called a damage assessment to measure the impact of the leak on national security. The damage assessment measures what intelligence operations -- including methods, sources and national security assets such as spy satellites -- were compromised by the leak. Sources -- including spies in other nations -- can be captured and killed or turned into double agents by their exposure. The methods by which we gather and analyze intelligence can be revealed, reducing or even mooting their future value. For example, the capabilities of spy satellites, most of which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, can be negated by being revealed to the people, groups, or nations that they are used against.

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