Duty To Protect

A CIA analyst who’d “played a lead role in locating Osama bin Laden” must now be “protected” from al Qaeda by the Agency, the Washington Post reports, on account of having been exposed publicly in a photograph released by the White House in May. The story doesn’t tell us, thankfully—though others have already tried to disinter and disseminate the facts of his life—how that protection will be accomplished. The analyst, like just such another by the name of Mrs. Valerie Plame Wilson, was not an undercover operative; his hobbled superiors are going to have to take the unusual step of classifying him. If two years’ worth of imprecations, depredations, and attempted prosecutions by other agencies of the Obama administration haven’t completely unmanned his bosses in the intelligence service, he may yet be safe from harm.

 

In a Sit Room State of Mind

The photo in question—of a tense-looking national-security team collected around the conference table in the Situation Room to watch the Navy Seals raid bin Laden’s Pakistani safe house—was issued the day after it was shot, in what cannot be doubted was an effort to make bank on this single signal act of bravery and decisiveness; it’s been parsed, ludicrously, up the wazoo, and photo-shopped, even more ludicrously, and it’s altogether exposed Mr. Obama and his foreign-policy apparat to some much-deserved scorn for turning the storied room into a prop. This isn’t the first time, either: The head nurses of the Obamic asylum have done it before, more than once, and most grotesquely in March, 2010, when the rapper Jay-Z and his “put-a-ring-on-it” bride, Beyonce, were allowed to ensconce themselves in a Sit Room State of Mind at what appears to be that very table.

But it’s no joke that the White House’s appalling insouciance and incompetence may have put an employee’s life in danger. It’s absolutely reprehensible.  I wonder, though: Does it transgress any laws? Violate anybody’s duty to protect? Does anybody care? The shame for the attorney general is that Timothy “Perjury” Russert is no more, and Richard “Leaker” Armitage and Patrick “Suborner of Perjury” Fitzgerald have moved on to drop their loads in other pastures, and therefore cannot be on hand to help Mr. Holder—on the off chance it is illegal and he decides to pursue some actual justice—to prosecute the wrong man.