The eyes have it--unless they don't.

In the Allenwood Penitentiary in Allenwood, PA,  Aldrich Ames turns 71 today.  He turned Soviet mole in 1985, and for over a decade, he sold information from his desk at CIA counter-intelligence, making millions, and sending 10 agents to their death in the process.  And here's the thing about this mole:  he didn't burrow down.  Nope, he was right out in the open.  The CIA didn't see anything funny about his heavy drinking, his questionable polygraph scores, and mind-bogglingly lavish spending that included a Jaguar, tailored suits and more than a half a million dollars in home and home improvements, paid for in cash, all on a $60,000 annual salary, Ames wasn't investigated until months before his arrest.  Here's a news report from the time:   http://tinyurl.com/ctnukzz 

But that was in the old Cold War.  Now we're in the endless War on Terror.  This week a federal judge ruled against the rights groups suing under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to see government cables relating to waterboarding and a photo of a "high value" detainee during the time he was waterboarded.  In objecting to the ruling, the New York Times noted:

The only thing that's hidden here
are those memos.

The court found that FOIA’s exemption for “intelligence methods” applied even though the brutal conduct illuminated by these records is considered illegal by President Obama and a host of laws and treaties and is not covered by the C.I.A.’s charter. The court also said the C.I.A. was justified in withholding two passages in Justice Department memos that appear to concern the origins of the Bush torture program.

And remember, it's the Obama Justice Department that's "winning" this case, and while Obama has exempted the torturers from prosecution, he's gone after the whistleblowers with ruthless zeal.  He really couldn't be more open about his love for government secrecy.  Yet liberals keep seeing him as one of their own. Funny how that works.   Here's the link to the NYT editorial http://tinyurl.com/cx67byh