The U.S. Intelligence Ship Is Too Leaky To Sail

thank you Obama
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U.K. police investigating the Manchester terror attack say they have stopped sharing information with the U.S. after a series of leaks that have so angered the British government that Prime Minister Therese May wants to discuss them with President Donald Trump during a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Brussels. What can Trump tell her, though? The leaks drive him nuts, too.

Since the beginning of this century, the U.S. intelligence services and their clients have acted as if they wanted the world to know they couldn't guarantee the confidentiality of any information that falls into their hands. At this point, the culture of leaks is not just a menace to intelligence-sharing allies. It's a threat to the intelligence community's credibility.

In 2003, President George W. Bush reportedly authorized an aide to leak highly classified intelligence on Iraq to The New York Times to support his decision to go to war. It was an early indication that leaks would be used for political purposes and that U.S. political leaders would consider it par for the course.

Then, in 2010, WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. intelligence data, including an Army Counterintelligence Center report on how to stop the release of secret documents on WikiLeaks. That didn't stop Julian Assange's website from releasing secret data provided by Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and, in 2013, by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden -- two of the biggest troves of secret material the public has ever seen.

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