For the Record, I Am Not on the CIA Payroll

Charlie Savage and Scott Shane have a great story today about U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies improperly spying on constitutionally protected activities of American citizens. Overcollection, as it’s euphemistically known in the intelligence business, has, unsurprisingly, occurred for years, despite official denials in the Bush administration. One American Muslim confab in March 2008, Savage and Shane report, became the subject of a Department of Homeland Security report. An internal review found the division producing the report “did not have any evidence the conference or the speakers promoted radical extremism or terrorist activity.”

But there’s much more, as Marcy Wheeler hones in on. Check out this letter from George Tenet, then the director of the CIA, to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, shortly after the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by extremists in Pakistan. Tenet tells the group that Pearl was not a CIA asset or operative. But then he declines to issue a firm denial that the agency is not having its assets or operatives pose as journalists. “A blanket statement that we would never use journalistic cover would, I know, be preferable to the members of ASNE,” Tenet writes. “The kinds of people who kidnap and murder reporters like Daniel Pearl, however, are unlikely to believe a policy statement by the U.S. government no matter how firmly it is made.”

So Tenet hides behind Omar Saeed Shaikh, Pearl’s most likely murderer. (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession to killing Pearl is rather dubious.) As someone who occasionally reports from war zones, I don’t appreciate the non-denial denial of something that could endanger my life. It’s one thing to say that fanatics won’t believe the denial. It’s quite another not to issue it for that — alleged — reason.