It's Called Original Reporting

I thought it was hilarious that Trent Lott short-circuited the secret prison "leak investigation" that the GOP-led Congress was about to undertake by dropping the bomb that the leak probably came from the Republican Senate caucus. However, I agree with this post at Kos that to believe Lott is to believe Dana Priest, the writer of the story, was simply handed this revelation on a silver platter.

The day this secret prison story broke, a friend of mine sent me the article. Well, he thought he sent me the article, but he actually sent a different article by Dana Priest written in May of last year. It was entitled "U.S. arranges to detain and interrogate terror suspects in secret." Here's an excerpt:

In Afghanistan, the CIA's secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as "The Pit," named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport, say U.S. government officials, counterterrorism experts and others. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert.

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantánamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safe-keeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.

Priest has been on this beat for a long, long time. Unlike stories from GOP operatives in the media, his don't come from single sources in the White House or Capitol Hill. They may corroborate, they may add details, but Priest is doing something so rare it should be featured on its own Wild Kingdom special: original reporting.

So you can investigate the leak all you want, but it was probably impeccably sourced by multiple officials inside and outside of the government, and it certainly did not endanger the security of the countries involved, since Priest declined to name them at the behest of the Pentagon. Then again, you're probably not going to investigate at all, are you?

UPDATE: This reader at Talking Points Memo makes a great point:

...didn’t Trent Lott himself continue to leak classified information in his comments off camera to CNN today?

If he was in that Republican only Senator’s meeting with Cheney last week and then confirms today that what was in the Dana Priest article last week was classified and discussed behind closed doors with Cheney, the CONFIRMATION of classified information has occurred.

As I recall from the whole Rove / Libby issues even the confirmation of classified information is a violation. Lott has basically confirmed today the off the books CIA prisons are real and that he got a classified briefing from Cheney. He basically confirmed the entire Wapo article, which I believe might be a violation itself!

I mentioned that he confirmed the existence of secret prisons, but didn't connect the dots in this way. To the grand jury with you, Trent!