RUSH: We’ll start in Las Vegas with Annie. I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Fine, thank you.
CALLER: Good. Listen, talking about contradictions and contradictory behavior, I want to know why it’s okay for the Washington Post to out a hundred secret prison facilities and who knows how many CIA agents around the world but it’s criminal behavior to out one woman who apparently was already an outed woman, CIA agent, Valerie Plame. That was disgraceful, abominable, an affront to the security and well-being of agents everywhere, in the middle of all this criminal behavior the Washington Post front page is a hundred secret facilities! Why…?
RUSH: Yes, and isn’t it interesting. I guess the media’s love affair with the CIA is over. You have a good point here, but you know the answer to your question, do you not?
CALLER: No, I don’t. I’m so upset that —
RUSH: Well, let me explain. Let me explain it to you. When you can defend the CIA and an outed agent and blame it on the Bush administration and try to get him thrown out of office for it, it’s perfectly okay to do it. But when you can out a CIA agent or a CIA operation for the same purpose of getting rid of Bush, then to hell with the CIA. You don’t care about who you’re endangering at the CIA at that point because the point is, “Get Bush! Get Bush! Get Bush!” Now, what she’s talking about — Annie, hang on here. There’s a front page Washington Post story today, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons — Debate is growing within agency about legality and morality of overseas systems set up after 9/11.” What we have here is another CIA leak. Somebody is leaking from the CIA, and it wasn’t that long ago — it’s been months — the New York Times ran a story about super-secret CIA air charter operation that was run out of Virginia or somewhere that was using chartered jets to fly prisoners to, no doubt, these secret prisons. That was in the New York Times. Now, sources for the story in the Washington Post are identified as “senior and mid-level CIA officers.” So for those of you who thought that maybe this whole Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame scenario was a CIA plan, an attempted coup d’etat of sorts to undermine the war in Iraq, the war on terror, and the Bush administration, you may have to give double notion to the theory, because it appears the same thing is continuing to happen here. Let me give you some details. “The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important Al-Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to US and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement. The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan, and several democracies in eastern Europe as well as a small center at Club G’itmo in Cuba, according to the current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents. The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public.”
A-ha! One of those famous black-ops, off-budgets! No written record of this. So it had to be leaked. “The existence and locations of the facilities referred to as black sites in classified White House, CIA, justice department, and congressional documents are known to only a handful of officials in the US, and usually only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.” Dana Priest is the writer of the story. Dana, a who told you this? We need an investigation. This is leaking from the CIA. This is exposing a CIA operation. This is exposing countless employees of the CIA. This is putting them at risk. We need an investigation! We need an independent counsel. We need to look deep into this and find out who’s leaking this to the press. “The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held.” Folks, if you print this out on your computer you get six to eight pages depending on your font size, six to eight pages of how evil the United States is; how evil George W. Bush is.
“The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program at the request of senior US officials. They argue that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.” Oh, so now the Post wants all this credit for patriotism! After blowing the cover, after leaking the story, now they want credit for being patriotic by not mentioning the names of the Eastern European countries involved in this. Another little excerpt: “It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other US government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.” Do you realize the speech-making at Rosa Parks’ funeral is still going on? It’s a three-hour funeral. Are you listening to it in there? I’m wondering. It doesn’t look like it’s the Wellstone memorial. In fact, I think this whole stunt yesterday was just like the Wellstone memorial, but John Kerry is up there speaking now. At any rate, after reading this paragraph, I kind of want to go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! Finally the CIA getting some guts here. We’re fighting the war on terror and to hell with it. We’ve got to do what it takes,” and then they go into torture, such as water boarding and all of that. So, Annie in Las Vegas, are you still with me?
CALLER: I am.
RUSH: All right, now, again, explain to me your outrage over this.
CALLER: Well, you know, we were talking about one person that apparently by her own hand outed herself, and now you have how many employees at a hundred different agencies or secret facilities around the world who are now in jeopardy, because now that these facilities have been brought to light, people who want to find those CIA agents will start to look. They didn’t even have a place to start before. Now they do, and I don’t understand why it’s okay for a person to discuss — a person who has, by the way, the security clearance to discuss an employee of the government, is being charged criminal –
RUSH: I’m telling you, it’s really not complicated. This is all about undermining our war effort, pure and simple. The people that are responsible for leaking and talking and printing this are attempting to undermine the war effort, the war on terror. This doesn’t have anything to do with Iraq. This is now the war on terror, which I think they’re linked, but when I say it has nothing to do with Iraq, this does not fit the template that the left is using on Iraq. So it’s all about destroying the CIA. It’s destroying our ability to conduct a war against terrorists. It’s all about getting Bush, and so you had a heroine in Valerie Plame and a hero in Joe Wilson because they were trying to get Bush, and the administration leaked her name and destroyed her life, ruined her life, and all of her friends that she worked with, are now suspected by their enemies and are at great, great risk, and, “Oh! We were wringing our hands,” and, “Oh! How horrible, but now that we’ve done this tenfold or twenty-fold, they deserve it. These are people breaking the law. This is CIA, and our love affair with the CIA has ended.” All I can tell you is, Annie, you are not alone. The vast majority of people who hear about this story, read this kind of stuff, detest the media. They detest the media — as I can hear it in your voice, you do. You sense hypocrisy; you sense a bunch of disingenuousness. So do millions of people. If the Democrats think this is going to help them, it isn’t. They can’t let go of this. This is Abu Ghraib; this is Club G’itmo. They can’t get away with it. By the way, we’ve got some new Club G’itmo stuff. We’ve got Club G’itmo staff T-shirts now. Go to the EIB Store at RushLimbaugh.com; you can see the new line we’ve added to our Club G’itmo line of merchandise and official clothing, in white and black in terms of T-shirt colors. They just keep the story alive. They cannot let go of it. It’s all oriented toward getting Bush, and you would think by now that — never mind, I’m applying rationality to them and they don’t have any. I’ve gotta take a quick time-out. Thanks for the call out there, Annie.
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RUSH: By the way, Annie out in Las Vegas, you have to also keep in mind reporters cannot be held criminally liable for their role in these kinds of things. If you’re wondering why is there no demand for the Washington Post to be held criminally accountable like there was administration officials, they can’t be. It’s a shield and they don’t even have to reveal their sources unless a special prosecutor sends them to jail, and no special prosecutor is going to send them to jail on this one. So this is obvious what this is all about.
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