Where's the outrage?(Notes & Comments: January 2006)

Bob Dole may have lost the election to Bill Clinton in 1996, but he asked the campaign's best question: "Where's the outrage?" Mr. Dole would be asking that again were he to contemplate the behavior of the press. We're thinking of the comparison that the journalist Max Boot recently made in his syndicated column between the way the press handled the revelation that Valerie Plame, who worked for the CIA, actually, er, worked for the CIA, and the orgy of obloquy that has greeted news of secret CIA prisons, etc. Only yesterday, Mr. Boot noted, "every high-minded politician, pundit and professional activist was in high dudgeon about the threat posed to national security" by that small-earthquake-in-Chile revelation. What a fuss there was, and what self-righteousness about "threats to national security," the integrity of our intelligence services, etc., etc.

Well, that was yesterday. But today, as Mr. Boot points out, there is a much more serious threat to security.

 
   Major media organs have broken news about 
   secret prisons run by the CIA, the interrogation 
   techniques employed therein, and the use 
   of "renditions" to capture suspects, right 
   down to the tail numbers of covert CIA 
   aircraft. They have also reported on a secret 
   National Security Agency program to monitor 
   calls and c-mails from people in the U.S. to 
   suspected terrorists abroad, and about the 
   Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity 
   designed to protect military bases worldwide. 

Much of this ...