Shh... It's a secret

Keeping up with Representative Jason Chaffetz, in his Tea Party inspired quest to outdo Wikileaks, Senator Shelby Chambliss (R - how'd you guess?) wants to know why the head of the CIA made a secret trip to Libya in the aftermath of the Benghazi attacks.

So instead of asking the CIA on the q-t, he asks reporters. Who dutifully file their reports and the world reads about it. I can imagine the aftermath of that. Head of CIA: "Can we meet in secret?" Head of Wherever Intelligence: "How many Congressmen are you bringing?"

Anyway, the CIA says it intends to provide its oversight committees with the relevant information. Which, I think, is a broad hint to Stop Talking About The Nation's Secrets In Public! At the rate Congressional Republicans are going, America will have the most open government on the planet. Everyone will know everything. Except what, if anything, is going through the minds of people like Rep. Jason Chaffetz and Sen. Shelby Chambliss. Heck, even Eric Cantor managed to keep quiet and you know how hard that is for him! Aha. We now know why Eric Cantor wasn't particularly voluble - he was trying to influence the investigation and hence the election.

I can see it now: the CIA, America's spies, will have to have Republican aides accompany them on secret trips. ... Oh wait, that's happened already:

Once in Afghanistan, Petraeus welcomed prominent conservative hawks from Washington think tanks. As Greg Jaffe wrote in The Washington Post, they were “given permanent office space at his headquarters and access to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided advice to field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders were getting from their immediate bosses.”

I guess the next step is for secret trips to be published on C-Span? Or Fox News.

Carolyn Ann