The CIA wants the Justice Department to investigate the source of a Washington Post story that said the spy agency was operating a global network of covert prisons.
An excerpt from the NYT story:
The C.I.A.'s request, known as a crimes report or criminal referral, means that the Justice Department will undertake a preliminary review to determine if circumstances justify a criminal inquiry into whether any government official unlawfully provided information to the newspaper. The possibility of this new investigation follows by less than two weeks the perjury and obstruction indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., then Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, in a leak case involving other news reporting about a national security issue.
Republican leaders in Congress also jumped into the matter over The Post's article, asking the Intelligence Committees of the House and the Senate on Tuesday to investigate whether classified material had been disclosed. At the same time, the Senate rejected a Democratic call for an independent commission that would conduct an investigation into claims of abuses of detainees in American custody.
Eric C. Grant, a spokesman for the newspaper, said it would have no comment on the new developments concerning its article. A spokesman for the C.I.A. said a crimes report had indeed been sent to the Justice Department but would not otherwise comment.
The front-page article, published last Wednesday, said the agency had set up secret detention centers in as many as eight countries in the last four years.
The existence of secret detention centers, and the identity of a few of the countries in which they were located, like Thailand and Afghanistan, had been previously disclosed. But the article, describing the prison system as a "hidden global internment network," told of previously undisclosed detention facilities at highly classified "black sites" in "several democracies in Eastern Europe."
The Post, citing a "request of senior U.S. officials," did not identify the Eastern European countries. But the mention of Eastern Europe stirred anxiety at the intelligence agency, particularly after Human Rights Watch, a group that has opposed American detention policies, issued a statement on Monday saying its research had tracked C.I.A. aircraft in 2003 and 2004 making flights from Afghanistan to remote airfields in Poland and Romania. The group said aircraft used in the flights had been previously flown by the C.I.A. for prisoner transport.
More broadly, former intelligence officials said the Post article had prompted concerns at the C.I.A. over threats to the agency's ability to maintain secret relationships with other intelligence services on detainee matters.
Update
From the Federation of American Scientists' Government Secrecy Project (H/T to Kevin):
SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2005, Issue No. 105
November 9, 2005
LEAK INQUIRY SOUGHT IN SECRET PRISON STORY
Republican leaders of Congress yesterday called upon the congressional intelligence committees to conduct a joint inquiry into the disclosure that the CIA is detaining and interrogating prisoners at secret locations abroad, as reported November 2 by Dana Priest of the Washington Post.
"As you know, if accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences, and will imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks," wrote Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.
"The leaking of classified information by employees of the United States government appears to have increased in recent years, establishing a dangerous trend that, if not addressed swiftly and firmly, likely will worsen," they wrote.
See their November 4 letter (signed November 8) here:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2005/11/leaklet.pdf