Yesterday I put up a post addressing Glenn Greenwald’s latest rant about the evils of the Bush administration which was actually a post about Mary McCarthy being fired from the CIA for leaking classified information to the press.

In the post I asked Mr. Greenwald two questions and emailed them to him. Although we disagree on most everything one of the things I like about Glenn is he does engage in the debate. I may not always agree with is tactics or reasoning but it is more than most on the left will do. Here were the questions followed by his response:
The first obvious question for Mr. Greenwald is, do you acknowledge that what Ms. McCarthy is accused of is in fact illegal? Without commenting specifically on her case do you condemn the leaking of classified information by CIA officers no matter their political preference?

What she is accused of may or may not be illegal, because there is an Executive Order in place prohibiting the classifying of information for the purpose of concealing illegal conduct or preventing embarrassment. There is no question - as the administration admits - that creating KGB-like secret torture gulags where prisoners have no legal recourse and are beyond the reach of human rights monitoring groups is the stuff of the most despicable totalitarian regimes.
There is no reason to conceal the existence of those camps (even if it’s proper to conceal who is detained there or where they are located) other than to prevent political embarrassment to the president and/or conceal conduct which very well may be illegal. Thus, whether it is illegal to have done what she is ACCUSED of doing depends upon the revelation of facts that we do not yet have.
Glenn Greenwald

Spoken like a true defense attorney. Although what he says is technically accurate it avoids the real question. Is leaking of classified information illegal? And the answer is categorically YES. Now If Glenn could find some of these supposed secret prisons and if they did actually operate like KGB run Gulags, and they were actually run by US intelligence officers and military he would have a point. Unfortunately for Mr. Greenwald and Ms. McCarthy he has none of these things. I don’t think Glenn is planning to run for office any time soon but if he does he may want to ask Dick Durbin about comparing the US military to mass murderers. To date there is no evidence whatsoever NONE of any US detention facility, be it GITMO, or Abu Ghraib that comes anywhere close to the systematic torture that took place in the Soviet Gulags. You compare the two at the risk of your own credibility. And yes there are several valid reasons for keeping the locations of detention facilities holding terrorists, and exactly which terrorists are held there secret in a time of war. Just a couple off the top of my head:

1. It protects our allies hosting the facilities from retaliation from said terrorist groups.
2. It maximizes the intelligence that can be gathered from these captured terrorists before their friends realize we have them.

To be clear so Glenn and his followers understand, the Soviet Gulags held Soviet citizens to punish them for their internal political dissent. They were not holding prisoners of war, or illegal combatants. Prisoners of war are historically held without charge until the conclusion of the war. They are not entitled to due process.