Loose Lips Seal Lips by Deroy Murdock on National Review Online

Loose Lips Seal Lips by Deroy Murdock on National Review Online
The British government waited until 1974 to reveal that the Enigma machines it acquired in 1939 allowed Winston Churchill to decipher most World War II Nazi military transmissions. The fact that British authorities kept this secret for 29 years after Hitler blew his brains out is a model of official self-control.

Today, Washington’s approach is exactly opposite: Don’t await the end of the War on Terror (oops . . . the Overseas Contingency Operation). Spill secrets now! Consider these recent items, some of whose details I have blurred — to tell enemy readers less, not more.

The “torture memos” that the Obama administration released discuss “enhanced interrogation techniques” that its predecessors successfully used to extract vital information from top al-Qaeda killers Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. The ensuing pageant of self-flagellation obscured the memos’ revelation that, after waterboarding, Zubaydah ratted out KSM. Once captured and waterboarded, KSM exposed plans to smack a jumbo jet into downtown Los Angeles’s 73-story Library Tower. Officials arrested this al-Qaeda conspiracy’s 17-man team and stopped yet another mass-incineration of American citizens.

This counter-terrorist victory notwithstanding, a very public debate has raged over what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi forgot about waterboarding, and when she forgot it. This high-profile debate has occurred mainly inside Pelosi’s head.

ABC News on April 30 named two CIA contract interrogators, identified the city where they live, and confronted them on camera to discuss their supposed involvement in waterboarding.

Recent accounts of CIA renditions named a Southeast Asian nation where U.S. counter-terrorists questioned al-Qaeda suspects. This not-entirely-stable country has endured unrest among its Muslim population, which probably was not impressed with this news.

While joking around at the March 22 Gridiron Dinner, Newsweek reports, Vice President Joe Biden disclosed the classified location of the “undisclosed location” where former veep Dick Cheney retreated during emergencies and where, presumably, Biden would hide.

Americans obviously cannot shut up. Consequently, experts warn, today’s blabocracy impedes foreign intelligence sharing. Paradoxically, loose lips seal lips.

“We can’t keep having a secret intelligence service if we keep giving away all the secrets,” former CIA director Porter Goss wrote on April 25 in the Washington Post. “Our intelligence allies overseas view our inability to maintain secrecy as a reason to question our worthiness as a partner. These allies have been vital in almost every capture of a terrorist.”

“This is causing serious problems for the reputation of U.S. intelligence,” a former intelligence officer told me, insisting on anonymity. “It’s more than just other services sharing information with us. It’s the issue of the CIA recruiting people who risk their lives to provide information to the U.S. government. When they read this stuff, like what Pelosi is revealing, they think long and hard about whether they want to share things.”

“Foreign sources have become more reluctant to expose themselves to the danger or retribution which results from contacts with U.S. intelligence operatives overseas,” Richard Valcourt, editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, says from his New York office. “The concern within the intelligence community is widespread, unmistakable, and warranted.” He adds: “Both public officials and intelligence personnel must return to the rule that prevailed over intelligence matters during the first 25 years of post-World War II intelligence operations. Reveal little; discuss less.”

While the Left itches to conclude the War on Terror and advance democratic socialism, America’s enemies have no such timetable.


Last Wednesday, federal officials in New York arrested four radical Muslims. “The defendants planned to strike military planes with surface-to-air guided missiles and to destroy a synagogue and a Jewish community center with C-4 plastic explosives,” said federal prosecutor Lev L. Dassin. Defendant James Cromite, a.k.a. Abdul Rahman, allegedly told a government informant that he hoped to join Jaish-e-Mohammed, an Islamic terror group, and “do jihad.” He added: “I hate those motherf***ers, those f***ing Jewish bastards . . . I would like to get a synagogue.”

Prosecutors say the defendants targeted the Riverdale Temple and Riverdale Jewish Center in the Bronx and surveilled the Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh, New York “beginning in April 2009.” On May 6, the informant furnished the defendants a missile and explosives (all disarmed). Court records state: “The three defendants celebrated their achievement shouting ‘Allah Akbar.’”


A federal jury on May 12 convicted five Miami men of conspiring to bomb Chicago’s Sears Tower. On March 16, 2006, the FBI videotaped this group pledging “bayat,” an oath of allegiance, to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

A federal judge on April 28 sentenced three illegal-alien, Macedonian, Muslim–extremist brothers to life in prison for conspiring to machine-gun soldiers at New Jersey’s Fort Dix. “I hate and reject the entire system of justice,” defendant Elvjir Duka wrote U.S. District Judge Robert Kugler. “The entire system will be defeated by Islam and there is no stopping it.”

Today’s quietude notwithstanding, the War on Terror grinds on. Believers in a global, Islamofascist ideology still labor to kill us. Given that deadly threat, Americans should listen more and yap less.